Consumer Guide Album

Bob Marley & the Wailers: Rastaman Vibration [Island, 1976]
If side one makes it seem that reggae has turned into the rasta word for boogie--even to a Trenchtown tragedy recited with all the toughness of an imprecation against litter--the unimpassioned sweetness of most of side two sounds like a function of reflective distance, assured in its hard-won calm. Some of it's even better. The Haile Selassie speech recreated here as "War" is stump statesmanship renewed by a believer, and if the screams that open the second side don't curdle the corpuscles of the baldheads who are being screamed at, then dread is gone from the world. B+