There is only one thing better than finding a new track from Link & Chain in your work pile, and that is finding two such sonic slices. If one can make your week, such a brace of cool and charming, positive and poised reggae will make your month, no, make your year.
Link & Chain plays classic reggae and old-school, golden-age Caribbean sounds. While there is much that is familiar here, the genre found its perfect form many decades ago; what they are great at is keeping things relevant and feeling part of the here and now, even while following in the sonic footprints of some great music makers. These footprints include those made by their own long and illustrious career.
Leave Us Alone feels timeless right from the word go: those skanking guitar lines, the breezy brass stabs, those glorious, backwards and off-the-beat rhythms and staccato grooves, which seem a mystery to most musicians outside the genre, fantastically propulsive basslines and the band’s trademark, interlaced harmonies. And, as always, there is a message of hope at the heart of the song, a call for peace and unity, a prayer that we can live our lives in a state of freedom rather than bowing and scraping before the powerful and the politically minded.
But if Leave Us Alone feels like the classic sound of the genre, 401-95 shows that Link & Chain are equally at home when testing the boundaries of the genre, here pushing into some scintillating rock territories. It is still a song based on the tenets of the reggae genre but adds some blistering guitar work and six-string sonics that shoot through the song, complimenting and contrasting brilliantly with the more expected chops and licks at the heart of the music. As The Mighty Bob (that’s Mr Marley to you) famously said, roots, rock, reggae, sure sound good to me! And who’s going to argue with that? Not I.
These two songs tell you everything you need to know about Link & Chain. It tells you that they are as happy to write in more traditional and familiar styles as they are found blending their sounds with other genres to keep the reggae story evolving. It also reminds us that they make music with a consciousness for the world around them; after nearly four decades in the game, they are as heartfelt and empathetic as ever, their music as emploring and hopeful as it has ever been, perhaps more so.
As the world becomes an ever darker, ever more unequal and difficult place to live in, it is hearting to find bands like Link & Chain still delivering their musical messages of hope and justice, equality and love, and music, which by its very nature brings a smile to your face and a spring to your step. And long may they continue to do so.