Heart of the Congos (1977)

My experience with reggae is fairly conventional boomer business, more or less. I know a fair amount of Bob Marley’s catalog and I’ve spent a lot of time with Trojan boxes and similar compilations from the ‘60s and ‘70s. In approximately 2009, just past the downloading era online and at a time when blogging was losing most of whatever juice it ever had, I recall a blogathon, one of those blogging exercises going on, a cooperative venture where everyone on their blog chipped in reviews of something and linked to others—in this case, the Heart of the Congos album. I had never heard of it. It was released in 1977, produced by Lee Perry, and then revived in the mid-‘90s apparently with renewed interest in dub. Ever since, I have noticed it placing high on most lists I see of best reggae albums. Mojo’s “The 50 Best Reggae Albums Ever!” published earlier this month is typical: “Perfect dread harmonies amid a Lee Perry mix of staggering complexity and endless soft-edged density,” it notes of the album, ranked at #5. I played it those years ago, warmed to it some but couldn’t think of much to say, and thus it ended up on my long get-to list. Which brings us to today. The reviews that came of that blogathon were effusive but not very enlightening. In fact, I still don’t have much to say and I’m even still a little mystified, so I’ll be on my way soon. I can say that, if the music didn’t hit me right away, it has tended to sound better every time I play it. Songs like “La La Bam Bam” are almost purely musical, like Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September.” Who needs actual words when you have this gift for melody? I note that a number of these 10 songs, all credited on Wikipedia to Cedric Myton and Roydel Johnson with some input from Lee Perry, often sound familiar and I was taking some as covers. “Can’t Come In” may be the best example, a version of “Keep A-Knockin’,” which has its own murky origins. It’s most often credited to Little Richard, but Louis Jordan recorded a version well before that and apparently parts of the song go back even further into 19th-century minstrelsy. It’s a little odd to me that I don’t see more reference to these sources of the Congos, but I also have to say I’m not bothered much by them. A lot of my favorites on those Trojan boxes are Jamaican covers of US and UK pop music, the way they so completely absorb these influences into the island frame. I’m less sure how Heart of the Congos connects to dub—if anything it reminds me more of the juju grooves from Nigeria and King Sunny Ade and others. It’s quiet and restrained but somehow fiercely intense behind that, and always lovely—worth making a habit of because it seems to unfold and deepen more all the time.