Tough Life

Junior Kelly – Tough Life (VP Records)
Reviewed by Sadie O., 12/5/05
Hard, righteous, in-your-face reggae with unique vocal stylings. Kelly has a voice with a lot of variation, from almost growling some of the toasting parts to occasionally singing quite nicely. The music is straightforward (not dubby), but hard and aggressive, with a female backing chorus sweetening the mix. The rasta hard-times songs are great with a very “stepping razor” vibe, the love songs mostly suck.
No FCC. 1, 9 and 10 are excellent.
1. 4:06 ***militant uptempo skank, hard toast, cool chorus.
2. 4:06 **cool bubble, oft-repeated “blaze” pronounced almost like he’s expelling something bad.
3. 3:29 **rather sweeter sound, with prominent horns and chorus. All sorts of vocalizations by Kelly.
4. 4:22 slow, more sung than toasted, rather commercial sounding.
5. 3:47 cool midtempo bubble, unfortunately there’s very commercial female vocals by JC Lodge. Without her, it would actually be pretty cool.
6. 4:02 midtempo, nice old-school keyboard, overly harmonized chorus.
7. 3:15 *midtempo, sweet vocals by Dennis Brown, complementing Kelly’s toasting and female chorus, very slightly dubby sounding.
8. 3:53 **midtempo, cool rasta lyrics.
9. 4:22 ***great midtempo skank, crazy toasting, fun stuff.
10. 3:27 ***snaky syncopation by Sly and Robbie – yah cool!
11. 3:19 **downtempo nyahbinghi beat, unusual instrumentation for that kind of vibe, but interesting.
12. 4:16 **good lyrics about how mistreating your woman makes you a loser. Kind of strangled sounding delivery in places.
13. 5:08 medtempo, pretty love song.
14. 4:41 starts with talking – attempted seduction. Uptempo and bouncy with decent toasting, but a bit embarrassing in places.
15. 4:05 **cool militant midtempo bump, with some quite odd falsetto bits, fun background noises.
16. 3:32 midtempo love song. Ok.
17. 4:14 midtempo bubble, very roots. Frequent repetition of chorus makes it a tad same-y.