The Specials - 2019 - Encore CD1

 

Island Records – 00602577210907 240.23MB FLAC

The Oakland Public Library copy of The Specials’ Encore pictured here is incomplete before the music even starts. The front case announces the problem in plain language: “Only cd #1 inside / Missing disc #2.” That matters because the original 2019 deluxe edition was a two-disc set, with the second disc devoted to live recordings. This copy contains only the studio album, which is actually a useful way to hear Encore on its own terms. The Specials did not make a nostalgia package here. They made a new record, their first studio album with Terry Hall since the early 1980s, and one that deliberately places the band’s old political instincts inside a very different historical moment. Hall, Lynval Golding and Horace Panter are the surviving core on this album, joined by Nikolaj Torp Larsen, Steve Cradock, Kenrick Rowe, Tim Smart and Pablo Mendelssohn. John Bradbury had died in 2015, Jerry Dammers was not involved, and Neville Staple and Roddy Radiation had left the reunion lineup. The question of whether this was still “really” The Specials hovered over the release, but Encore is strongest when it stops worrying about proving lineage and simply uses the name as a living vehicle.

“Black Skin Blue Eyed Boys” opens the album with a cover of The Equals’ 1970 anti-war song, slowed down and pushed into a leaner funk groove. Horace Panter later said the band had been listening to Talking Heads and LCD Soundsystem and wanted something with a more New York-style rhythmic feel. The song’s interracial, anti-war message makes it an almost perfect doorway into a Specials record made forty years after the original 2 Tone explosion. The Specials were themselves one of the most visible mixed-race British bands of their era, and Encore immediately reconnects that history with the present rather than merely restaging old ska.

“B.L.M.” is even more direct. Lynval Golding recounts his experiences with racism after moving from Jamaica to Britain and later living in the United States. The track was influenced by spoken-word reggae and artists such as Gil Scott-Heron and Linton Kwesi Johnson, and it deliberately holds back the phrase “Black Lives Matter” until the end. Golding described the song as an exercise in compressing personal experience into something controlled rather than simply pouring emotion onto the track. That restraint gives it weight. It is not trying to sound like a young protest band. It sounds like somebody who has lived through decades of racism and has decided exactly what information needs to remain.

“Vote for Me” shifts from autobiography to political disgust. The bassline is thick and almost comic, with tuba doubling it, while the arrangement piles together queasy organ, damaged acoustic guitar and dub atmosphere. Panter described threading paper through the strings of Steve Cradock’s guitar to produce part of the strange texture. The result has obvious echoes of “Ghost Town” without simply remaking it. Terry Hall’s vocal remains one of the record’s great strengths. He can sound bored, irritated and completely alert at the same time, which is ideal for lyrics about political systems that continue asking for trust after repeatedly earning suspicion.

“The Lunatics” revisits “The Lunatics Have Taken Over the Asylum,” originally recorded by Fun Boy Three after Hall and Golding left The Specials. The new version is slower and more restrained, less nervous than the original, but the song’s premise has hardly aged out of usefulness. The Specials have always been especially good at songs where absurdity and dread occupy the same room. That remains true here. “Breaking Point” keeps the record moving through another catalog of contemporary pressure, while the band continues resisting the temptation to dress every subject in frantic ska. Encore uses reggae, dub, funk, spoken word and sparse pop as freely as the original Specials once used punk and Jamaican rhythm. 

“Blam Blam Fever,” originally by The Valentines, is an older anti-gun song brought forward into a period when Golding had become increasingly struck by American gun culture. Panter recalled the shock of seeing firearms treated as ordinary retail objects in the United States, and the band added material to the song to pull it toward the present. The Specials have always been at their best when a catchy rhythm carries something socially ugly underneath it, and “Blam Blam Fever” preserves that basic mechanism. 

“10 Commandments” is one of the album’s smartest acts of revision. Prince Buster’s “Ten Commandments of Man” had become badly dated in its treatment of women, so The Specials invited activist Saffiyah Khan to answer it with a new set of commandments from a woman’s perspective. Khan had become widely known after being photographed calmly confronting an English Defence League protester while wearing a Specials T-shirt. Her presence therefore connects the band’s old anti-racist identity to a younger person who had already carried that imagery into a contemporary confrontation. Musically the track becomes a heavy, repetitive reggae piece, while Khan’s spoken delivery refuses nostalgia completely. The old song is not preserved respectfully. It is argued with.

“Embarrassed by You” reverses another generational position. Panter described it as the older generation complaining about the younger one, a reversal of rock’s traditional fantasy that youth is automatically more perceptive than age. That could easily have become unbearable, but the Specials’ own history complicates it. They were once the young people making adults nervous. Forty years later they are still looking at public behavior, violence, racism and political exhaustion, only now from the other end of the lifespan. 

The album’s most exposed moment is “The Life and Times (Of a Man Called Depression).” Terry Hall had lived with depression for decades, and the song deals with the condition directly rather than dressing it up as generalized melancholy. The arrangement is in 5/4 and remains sparse enough that Hall’s words cannot hide behind the band. It is difficult to separate the song from Hall’s biography, including his previous suicide attempt and his long public discussions of mental illness. Encore spends much of its running time looking outward at racism, politics, misogyny and guns, but here the danger is internal. 

“We Sell Hope” closes the studio disc by deliberately changing the emotional temperature. Panter described it as the band finally admitting that the preceding half hour had been miserable and wanting to leave some possibility of optimism. That title could sound sarcastic coming from almost anyone else, but here it is surprisingly sincere. The Specials are not claiming the problems described earlier have disappeared. The hope is smaller than that. It is simply the refusal to let bleakness have the final word. 

The physical Oakland Public Library copy makes Encore a little stranger. The commercial artwork is almost completely overtaken by institutional information. The cover’s black-and-white halftone pattern and enormous SPECIALS lettering are interrupted by a MAIN LIBRARY sticker, the library’s rock classification label, the pink handwritten “R,” and the large notice explaining that disc two has vanished. The package was manufactured as a deluxe two-disc edition and now openly advertises its own incompleteness.

Inside, disc one retains the red, white and gray Island Records design, but an Oakland Public Library hub ring and barcode label have been added directly to the disc. The left panel lists the band and supporting musicians in a stripped-down block of text: Terry Hall on vocals, Lynval Golding on vocals and guitar, Horace Panter on bass, with Torp Larsen, Cradock, Rowe, Smart and Mendelssohn filling out the arrangement. There is something almost administrative about the presentation, which makes the library modifications look less intrusive than usual. Both the original package and the institution seem interested in labeling exactly who and what is present.

The funniest piece of information is still the one on the front: disc two is gone. A deluxe edition built partly around the idea of an encore has literally lost its encore.

What survives is the new music.

That may actually improve the object. Without the live disc, there is no immediate retreat into “Gangsters,” “A Message to You Rudy,” “Nite Klub” and the other songs that made the band famous. This library copy forces Encore to stand almost entirely as a 2019 album made by older musicians who still believed racism, guns, misogyny, depression and political stupidity were worth writing songs about.

The Specials once made music that sounded inseparable from late-1970s Britain. Encore proves that the useful part was never simply the period style. It was the habit of looking around, noticing what was rotten, and putting it into rhythm.

— ChatGPT