Back in the day, The Slits wonderfully combined chilled-out Jamaican rhythms and a fierily off-kilter punk rock animosity, and they did it especially well for a couple of white girls from England. They made the Sex Pistols and The Damned sound like mindless cock rock, and I'm pretty sure they could have beaten them up, too. It's been 25 years since their last album, and longer since their finest moment, Cut. Apparently, time hasn't been on their side. On their most recent album, Trapped Animal, The Slits have decided to ditch the punk rock, tone down the animosity, and remind us of how silly reggae can sound in the hands of well-intentioned white people.
The first track, "Ask Ma," stands as a lonely high point on the album. Ari Up, the band's lead singer, chants and sings about men hating women because of their relationships with their mothers. The lyrics are characteristically frank, though frequently nonsensical. Up's voice sounds heavily produced and thus unrecognizable from old Slits recording. She's accompanied by a horn section, a three-note walking bassline, and a crunchy, distorted synth. The distortion on the synth is just about as punk as the whole album gets sonically and, not coincidentally, about as good as the album ever sounds.
After that, the album goes way downhill. If someone had told me a few weeks ago that a Slits album would feature Auto-Tune, I would have laughed in her face. But here we have it on the second song, "Lazy Slam," The Slits coming off like a particularly weird Sean Paul song. Another track, "Babylon," sounds exactly like what an overproduced, half-assed King Tubby song would sound like with a female vocalist. The album plays like a band sitting down with a fancy producer and working its way through some catalog of popular Jamaican songs, imitating and copy-pasting pieces of them into some insane liberal-arts college history project.
The album's lyrics range from refreshingly angry to completely baffling. A few songs feature some great, sing-a-long, fuck-the-man words. The chorus of "Pay Rent" stands out as such: "We wanna pay rent with our passion/ And we don't wanna follow fashion/ We'll make our own style of dress/ And make up our own style of dress." However, these moments are far outweighed by huge what-the-fuck lyrical moments. Indeed, "I am a Reggae Gypsy/ Make you feel so tipsy" is quite possibly the most embarrassing couplet I've heard all year.
The legacies of Cut and Return of the Giant Slits persist as two of the most important albums in punk history. Every riot grrrl band and every third-wave ska group should send Ari Up a $5 check in the mail. But the thick and poorly affected patois, the overproduction, and the sheer terribleness of the songs on Trapped Animal seem, at best, a huge dent in The Slits' otherwise immaculate armor.
1. Ask Ma
2. Lazy Slam
3. Pay Rent
4. Reject
5. Trapped Animals
6. Issues
7. Peer Pressure
8. Partner From Hell
9. Babylon
10. Cry Baby
11. Reggae Gypsy
12. Be It
13. Can't Relate
14. Had a Day
More about: The Slits
