Credit: Found On Internet

It has been five long years since Skindred’s last album, the disappointing ‘Babylon’. It was always going to be tough capturing Benji Webbe and his associates’ live energy on record, but the over-produced vocals, flat-sounding riffs and the overwhelming feeling of “oh, that’s it?” that came with ‘Babylon’ was a sore disappointment for anyone who’d seen the raga-punk quartet energise even the most jaded of post nu-metal crowds.

Thankfully, producer Matt Squire has by and large kept his finger off the buttons that had doubled-up Webbe’s vocals on their debut to itchy-balls levels of irritation. The vocals on ‘Roots Rock Riot’ still occasionally feel over-produced and over-effected. Benji Webbe has one of the most distinctive voices in UK – hell, in the entire world – metal scene. There’s no need to digitize, vocoder and button-push added bells and whistles on to his vocal tracks.

Born of the ashes of Dub War, Skindred have been one of the few metal bands who’s attempts at genre-crossover seem genuinely borne of a love of all that they mix up, rather than the more tokenistic ideas-theft of many of their former contemporaries. And unlike the soundalike forgettable long players churned out by other Welsh metal bands we could name, Skindred’s ragga-punk mash-up of everything from dancehall beats and reggae bridges to full on thrash metal monster riffs makes them an altogether more palatable option.

An example of this ability to bounce from genre to genre without it seeming calculated or effected comes in ‘State Of Emergency’. It manages to fold pure reggae melodies into some chunky punk-metal riffery, and at no point do you feel like a hideous ska knock-off. Sometimes it doesn’t work so well – the casio keyboard ragga that opens ‘Rude Boy For Life’ (if you take a collective cringe now, it will ease the pain later, believe) soon stumbles into a riff that slips and slides between the laziest kind of pop-emo and even slinks to near-Evanescence levels of slicked-up emoting. Just stop it.

Luckily, there are more than enough beefy slabs of full metal racket – like the sucker-punch grinds of ‘Cause Ah Riot’ – to balance out the off-moments of Skindred’s second LP. In fact, all the tracks with titles that could be orders – ‘Destroy The Dancefloor’, with its pounding piledriver riff, the jerky System Of A Down-esque rhythms of ‘Spit Out The Poison’, and even the calypso-dancehall-learns-powerchords that is ‘Ease Up’ – are heavy metal balls of the record.