The course of the Welsh’s over the last decade has been anything but accidental. Especially in the UK, their development can only be described as rapid, and they are slowly starting to conquer more and more territory. Many artists have attempted to put many different elements into their music in an attempt to bring together a diverse audience, but most of them succeed more in confusing people than in making them find something in their music that suits them. There are few instances where such experiments in music have succeeded. These are not easy things, unless we are talking about Skindred. These musicians are truly brilliant. They manage to an extremely good degree to marry up countless idioms, whose audience is “dangerously” heterogeneous, and present incredibly complete works, perfectly adapting rock, metal, funk, rap, hip hop, ska, reggae, and the list is endless. Skindred exude both source passion and professionalism at the same time, elements necessary to surround all the compositional ester that is captured in “Smile”. Skindred’s new album is all of the above. I could dwell on “State Of The Union” and “Black Stars” which stood out, but that would do justice to the other ten tracks, each of which has something different and interesting to say. “Smile” is a perfectly complete release, promising and one that will surely push the band into a higher category of recognition.
I couldn’t help but mention that if you should check out the band for those of you who haven’t heard them, once, you should seek to see them live, ten times. Benji Webbe in particular, lead singer of the band is something else both as a voice and as a performer and their shows are some of the best I’ve seen in several years!
