Lynval Golding, Horace Panter and Neville Staple brought the group back in 1996 and that incarnation lasted for five years before being put on ice, but their revival was overshadowed by the 2008 reunion that featured vocalist Terry Hall as well as Roddy Radiation and John Bradbury from the group's golden days. The Specials didn't end their golden age cleanly and they didn't reunite smoothly, either.
#SPECIALS ENCORE DOWNLOAD#
Mon SCARBOROUGH Scarborough Spa Grand HallĬlick here to compare & buy The Specials Tickets at and download this album in a wide variety of formats depending on your needs. Sat NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE O2 Academy Newcastle Sun ApCARDIFF Cardiff University Students Union The Specials Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows: Thu ApDUBLIN Olympia Theatre Or as Hall puts it, just as “horribly relevant”. One imagines a Specials gig in 2019 is just as affecting as it was in 1979. While the album is excellent, it really promotes them as a live act. In the Specials’ hands, this never feels derivative or copycat-more the result of a group that acts as a kind of old-school covers band (or ‘dance band’ as they were termed), but who have such personality that they retain artistic integrity. There is an electric piano run on The Life and Times of a Man (Called Depression) that is almost a direct lift of Ray Manzarek’s keys work on Riders on the Storm.
This has proven a delicate, occasionally volatile musical idea to manage, and ‘Encore’ maintains the balance superbly.Īdditionally, they are a band who wear their influences on their sleeves. Conceptually, they are a musical collective, which should allow for fluid and harmonious personnel changes, but they are also a highly defined brand. One of the reasons that the Specials have been through so many iterations, most notably the Special AKA, is the format of the band. Though the track updates the sound with intellectual honesty, Khan’s bars dance right on the edge of being brilliant and cringeworthy: “Is that what it takes to impress a bloke whose brain is made up of curvy size zeros and anti-gravity tits?” It’s the most hard-hitting and memorable track on the album, and also likely to divide opinion. The track is a sprawling spoken word reggae jam akin to their global hit Ghost Town and its follow up The Boiler, a harrowing rape narrative fronted by Rhoda Dakar.
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Opener Black Skin Blue Eyed Boys is an Eddy Grant-penned track that works superbly with the unaffected English vocal of Hall, despite a very American-sounding funk arrangement.Įlsewhere, 10 Commandments (a feminist riff on a sexist Prince Buster song) is delivered with biting anger, here voiced by guest vocalist Saffiyah Khan, who is widely known for facing down the EDL at a Birmingham protest in 2017. Some of the strongest songs here are covers. Though just three of the original band are present on ‘Encore’-Terry Hall, Lynval Golding and Horace Panter-the album hits many of the group’s original marks, talking about mental health, race relations and political dislocation with intelligence and integrity, while the 2-Tone sound has the same hypnotic chunkiness that brought them to the forefront of British music all those years ago.
The Specials’ first official album since 1980 is a rich collection of eclectic pop that covers funk, ska and reggae with great energy and verve.
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