Album Review: Brain Damage meets Big Youth – Beyond the Blue (2021)

Released earlier this year on the Jarring Effects label, Beyond the Blue is an album with quite a sobering backstory. A collaboration between legendary Jamaican DJ Big Youth, France-based dub producer Martin Nathan (aka Brain Damage), and Jamaican-born studio veteran Samuel Clayton Jr., it was recorded in Kingston in March 2020, just as the first wave of Covid-19 sent the planet into meltdown, and lockdown. And that’s when things took a tragic turn for the worst.

The trio had barely started the process, recording just a few takes before both Nathan and Clayton Jr. contracted the virus. Nathan somehow managed to return to France, with the remaining pair opting to try to continue with the album in Kingston alongside fellow Anchor Studios producer Stephen Stewart. Sadly, Clayton Jr. would not survive, succumbing to the virus before the project reached completion. 

With the support of his label, Nathan resolved to finish the album, mixing the work-in-progress and adding the finishing touches back in Lyon, after eventually winning his own prolonged battle with Covid-19. The result is Beyond the Blue, a masterclass in reggae toasting and dub production, and a fitting tribute to the talent and determination of all three key protagonists. 

For the uninitiated, Big Youth (Manley Buchanan, to his Mum) is something of a legend in Jamaican DJ circles. With the recent loss of Jamaican uber producer Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, you could say he is one of the last great survivors of the reggae’s 1970s and 1980s golden age. Now in his 70s, he is one of the pioneers of the popular “toasting” vocal style, alongside contemporary U-Roy, who coincidentally, is another of the genre’s greats to pass in 2021. 

The album itself is superb. A compelling mix of rootsy flavours, rocksteady, ska, jazz (yes, jazz) it finds Big Youth in fine vocal form. There’s a couple of jazzy remakes of the classic ‘I Pray Thee’, which bookend the 12-tracks on offer, and beyond the usual declarations of faith and chants of praise, there’s a fair bit of prescient social and political content as well. As you’d expect. 

And naturally, given the context, there are also a couple of references to the virus itself. There’s a nice touch on a couple of tracks where the recording of in-studio spoken narrative or preamble is left in, raw and unedited, presumably as a tribute to Clayton Jr. 

I especially enjoyed the old school rocksteady-paced stuff, with the ridiculously infectious, yet relatively simple groove of ‘Those Days’ in particular, quickly becoming a firm favourite. 

But they’re all pretty good tunes, and Martin Nathan, wearing his Brain Damage hat, deserves enormous credit for not only providing the compositions which allow Big Youth to shine, but for bringing the project to completion at a time when it might have been easier to simply shelf it. The album can be found on Bandcamp here. 

R.I.P. Samuel Clayton Jr. 

Here’s the 2020 version of ‘I Pray Thee’, which opens the album:

Album Review: The Killers - Pressure Machine (2021)

I can’t say I’m a big fan of The Killers. I quite liked a couple of the band’s early singles, but I’ve never really been drawn to any of the many album releases, and I think party anthem ‘Mr Brightside’ is one of the most overrated pieces of bombast ever to pass itself off under the guise of an iconic indie rock tune. 

Which will make it all the more surprising when I tell you that I’m absolutely loving the latest Killers album, Pressure Machine, right now. I’m not sure quite how I got here. 

To compound just how disconcerting this is for me is the fact that as a long-term sceptic about the worth of Bruce Springsteen in the widescreen view of rock history (not a fan), I reckon Pressure Machine might just about be the most Springsteen-like album ever made by a bunch of musicians not called the E Street Band.

The biggest issue I’ve had with both Springsteen and The Killers in the past is that inescapable in-yer-face over-produced celebratory or triumphant “big” sound so beloved by so many. Subtlety and understatement have seldom been in the vocabulary of either Bruce or (Killers’ all-American hero) Brandon Flowers. Unless the album is Springsteen’s stripped-back masterpiece Nebraska, which admittedly is rather great, or as with this case, a 2021 rebirth for The Killers called Pressure Machine. 

The overriding vibe of the album is one of smalltown midwestern America, out in the back blocks of beyond, with tales about “hillbilly heroin pills”, opioid abuse, poverty, blind love, bent truths, sexual difference, suicide, and as on one stand-out track (‘Quiet Town’), the supposedly true story about the death of a teenage couple after they were hit by an oncoming train. Real life, observational, blue collar, gritty, grassroots stories that will surely resonate. 

The bonus being you won’t have to listen through too much sonic overload in order to grasp the theme of each song. Aided by short introductory spoken/dubbed narratives for most of them. The lyrics are right up in your face, but only because they’re not being drowned out, and because Flowers doesn’t have to strain to be heard above the din. Which means that musically it’s a little more stripped-back than might have otherwise been expected. A lot of acoustic guitar, some steel guitar, large helpings of harmonica, plus there’s a fair bit of atmosphere-enhancing cello and violin/fiddle etc. 

There are moments when the aforementioned “big” sound kicks in, resulting in a few of those overbearing pompous moments, but for the most part it feels a hell of lot more authentic and honest than anything I’ve ever previously heard from The Killers. Flowers sings these songs with an integrity and humility I’ve never before associated with him or his band. Where Flowers’ vocal might once have pushed me away, on Pressure Machine it draws me in close. 

And that might just be the key to my enjoyment of this Killers album, one that I picked up on a whim. I’m thankful that I did so. 

There’s no filler here, and the highlights include ‘West Hills’, ‘Quiet Town’, ‘Runaway Horses’, which features Phoebe Bridgers, ‘In Another Life’, and ‘Desperate Things’.