#392: Burning Spear - Marcus Garvey (1975)

Zack: Let me get this out of the way right now: I listened to albums 391-394 back-to-back-to-back-to-back while working on my prospectus, so the same disclaimer about not paying the most attention I gave for Tarkus applies here as well. That said, I liked Marcus Garvey enough to go back and relisten to all the songs I realized I had completely not paid attention to. Which means I basically ended up listening to this album 2.5 times by accident, and I have absolutely no qualms about that. Marcus Garvey is a reggae album and we haven’t had a chance to listen to one of them in a long, long time (I haven’t gone back and looked, but I think the last one was Peter Tosh’s Legalize it somewhere on the other side of 300). Marcus Garvey definitely had some political undertones to it which didn’t get through to me at all. All I noticed was the smooth grooves that kept telling me how nice it would be to be relaxing in a tropical paradise somewhere. And while I’m excited to double back to get more about the message, the feeling that the album had is pretty much all you can ask from a reggae album.

Favorite Tracks: Slavery Days; Tradition; Resting Place

Emily: Reggae music is deceptively simple - the steel drums and chill vibes evoke Jamaica's tropical climate, beautiful beaches, and laid-back party atmosphere. However, underneath these first impressions frequently lie revolutionary lyrics that reflect the political, economic, and social turmoil that took over the island after its independence and continues to some extent today. My favorite example of this is Jimmy Cliff's The Harder They Come (probably because I wrote a paper about the album and its accompanying film for a class in college), but Burning Spear's Marcus Garvey comes in a close second. The album cover itself indicates that it's not just a reggae party album, revealing the political and militant content right up front. A first listen reveals a classic upbeat reggae sound, right at home on the beach or in a dancehall. However, I need to listen to Marcus Garvey a few more times to fully grasp the entire context - something I definitely intend to do in the future.

Favorite Tracks: Marcus Garvey; Tradition; Old Marcus Garvey

#391: Emerson, Lake & Palmer - Tarkus (1971)

Emily: Emerson, Lake & Palmer sounds like it should be the name of a '70s soft rock band, the kind that wears Canadian tuxedos and big mustaches and plays exclusively on adult contemporary radio and in waiting rooms. But then I saw that their album had a robot armadillo on the cover, so I knew that I was in for something totally different. Tarkus (which is the name of the aforementioned armadillo, according to Wikipedia) starts out with a 20-minute prog rock jam session. The rest of the album consists of much short tracks that continue the prog sound, with jazz and classical influences and a couple tracks that wouldn't be out of place in a particularly proggy church. I still don't understand where the armadillo plays into all of this, but I'm glad the album defied my expectations.
Favorite Tracks: Tarkus; Bitches Crystal; A Time and a Place

Zack: Prog rock has been so hit or miss, so it was nice to find that this album struck a happy medium between weird and listenable. The weirdness, which mostly shone through on the 20-minute title track, isn’t an abrasive kind of strange, but more like things just sound a bit off, like the entire album is just slightly positioned off center somehow. It gives it a sort of kooky vibe that I actually quite enjoyed. Once you get past the first track, which I need to reiterate is more than 20 minutes long and more than half the album’s total length, all the songs sort of breeze right by. I was working on my prospectus throughout the album, so I wasn’t necessarily paying the most attention that I could have, but it seemed like an album well-deserving of its art, in its general nature of making you both slightly confused but sort of appreciative.

Favorite Tracks: Tarkus; Are You Ready Eddy; The Only Way (Hymn)