UB40

Like Culture, Burning Spear and other great Jamaican bands of the Seventies, England's
UB40 uses reggae's joyous buzz to put across some devastating social observations. Behind
the vivid cartoon cover and pumping, singsong title track of the band's fifth album lurks a
metaphor as potent as Bob Marley's "Small Axe." Apartheid isn't mentioned by name during
"Rat in Me Kitchen," but by the time toaster and trumpet player Astro has run thr... More >

One way you know they're a real reggae band is that you always think they've run out of songs until you play the album one last time. But they're a pop band, too--you don't perfect such seamless effects on a reggae budget. It would be puritanical to refuse the salves and ointments of this kind of intelligent political product. But it would be utopian to claim it cures anybody's ills. (Grade: B+)