Album cover, Save Us Oh Jah. - CONTRIBUTED
WITH A VOICE as distinctive, as melodious as (as corny as it sounds, it is true) sweet as Cocoa Tea's, it is hard for him to do a bad song.
However, unlike the West Indies cricket team which seems to be content avoiding defeat against the real Indians in the current Test series, the man from Clarendon does much more than avoid dropping a bad tune on the 15-track set, Save Us Oh Jah from VP Records.
He presents a mixture of philosophical and relationship oriented (read women) songs, couched in lyrics that at times show the influence of his spontaneous stage improvisations, all to music that, with a few exceptions, sticks to the slower side of reggae. And with Biological Clock and Don't Give Your Love Away, the music actually goes into the realms of R&B.
The quality of the set has a lot to do with the musicians, who include Donald Dennis and Kirk Bennett on drums, Mitchum Chin and Earl 'Chinna' Smith on guitar, Dean Fraser on saxophone and the Firehouse and Prophecy bands (the latter step out of Capleton-backing-fiery-dancehall mode for Biological Clock).
The album opens with Cocoa Tea giving melody to the chilling street slang "anything a anything", normally a prelude to violence, but in this instance the introduction to the warning Stay Far on a slow drum and guitar combination. Cocoa Tea pronounces his 'ths' (a very important thing for all singers) as he croons the Jamaican reality "100 miles out a town nowadays not safe/because the crime and the violence it no stop migrate".
UPTEMPO TRACKS
He continues with the philosophical and Jamaican situation bent with the title track, which has the very good and relevant lines "so all the peace officers they are in danger/dem shot dem own so dem no care if you a stranger". Did somebody say pull up?
One of the few uptempo tracks is Let The Music Play, which tells the tale of a road trip in the United States with Capleton and the Prophecy Band, before he goes slow and onto the relationship side of things with Indian Woman (where laid back dancehall gets good treatment), How Yu So Hypa and Got You Now ("let me hide you, where Joe Grind cannot find you/somewhere down in Clarendon".)
The fire is not to be left out by a steaming Cocoa Tea, Babylon Feel It and Can't Tek The Fire Bun (the latter with the good lines "how much people get lick dung since 1494/and now it tun epidemic, cyaan fin' no cure") taking care of that side of things.
The love songs resume with It Was a Charm, then Don't Give Your Love Away and Cocoa Tea's interesting take on the Biological Clock before he addresses an attempted trip to Barbados with the immigration officers saying "stop him no mek him pass through/him is a bad influence for the youths down here too".
And he closes with memories of the dancehall in Spin Da Song Ya, singing of the "when dancehall used to jam/woman a wine up pon man" to end a good album.
Track listing
1. Stay Far
2. Save Us Oh Jah
3. Let The Music Play
4. Indian Woman
5. How Yu So Hypa
6. Got To Know
7. Wave Yu Hand
8. Can't Tek The Fire Bun
9. Babylon Feel It
10. It Was a Charm
11. Don't Give Your Love Away
12. Biological Clock
13. Stop Him
14. Sex Drugs and Crime
15. Spin The Song Ya
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