Record sales and extensive touring have made him an American Hasidic Jewish reggae superstar of sorts, but shrugging off the ‘novelty’ tag and gaining artistic credibility has been something of an uphill struggle for Matthew Paul Miller, generally known by his Hebrew name ‘Matisyahu‘. Let’s face it, religion and music … it’s not exactly a match made in heaven! And marrying the singer’s political views and ‘one world’ vision with a new musical direction on his latest work Light may require yet another leap of faith … so is it change for change’s sake, and is the artist and his fanbase comfortable with the new style? Continually putting back the release date (originally out on 25th August 2009 in the US, the official UK release is slated for this June) seemingly to match the new album with a busy touring schedule hopping continents, would suggest an uneasy transition …

Matisyahu’s reputation has been built on solid live performances. His 2004 debut Shake off the dust … arise sounds like a concert, and Epic, hearing the potential of the artist, backed his 2nd official release Live at Stubbs in 2005, actually an early gig plugging the album. Fusing styles of rap, beatboxing, hip-hop and Jamaican dancehall with more traditional vocal disciplines like ‘scat’ and the Jewish ‘hazzan’ style of songful prayer, and with the help of his band Roots Tonic to wrap the whole mix up in reggae, Matisyahu concerts have become a festivalgoers dream. But the singer has often alluded to doing more with the studio presentation of his music. His work with Bill Laswell on 2006 album Youth cemented the artist’s renown as a successful reggae act on the fringes of World Music, and certainly improved his record sales, but its big bassy charms not withstanding may have suffered from some of the producer’s eccentricities. Veteran producer David Kahne has been co-opted on the latest release, a man responsible for more ‘packaged’ reggae pop acts like Sublime and Fishbone. It seems that Matisyahu has decided to ‘get serious’ and make a pop record, so Light is a very different kind of beast to its predecessors.

Kahne has kept Matisyahu’s wide-eyed political view, and his love of things historical and spiritual, but married it off musically with enhanced beats and all kinds of production trickery, high-tech and polish it may be, but where’s all the reggae gone?? True, ‘Smash lies’ is a rich dancehall-driven piece of pop euphoria and obviously blazing the new hip-hop-inspired trail, but ‘So hi so lo’ would sound more at home on a Chilli Peppers’ album than anything Bob Marley might have come up with. And apart from the slight ‘singjay’ in his vocal, the anthemic and much hyped ‘One day’ rings more like 80s boyband holidaying in Jamaica … the break from reggae is, even to a self-confessed genre dabbler, part-liberating, part-maddening! And, please tell me my ears are deceiving me, but does ‘For you’ sound like Peter Gabriel? It’s obvious where all this is heading … into a field with generic mud, fists saluted in the air and lighters waving amock. Closing track ‘Silence’ stays narrowly the right side of self-parody with opening lines in prayerful Hebrew … I cannot take the Lord’s name in vain., but by this time my brain wants to retreat into the silence ….

Hard to lampoon someone who’s obviously trying to do good, and churlish to question any artist’s integrity, but ‘good works’ doesn’t equal ‘good work’, whichever God you believe in. I’m sorry, but ‘bland’ sounds the same in any religion. Not that my review will make any difference to global sales of Light, which will surely be stratospheric, but I’m afraid this listener’s affections were well and truly cast out in the cold … experiments with reggae can easily turn awry, but Matisyahu’s work with Laswell did have a sort of bumbling World Music resonance and seemed to fit with the tight jam-band sound of his live performances. A white middle-class Jewish kid sounding like a cross between Phish, the Chilli Peppers and Barrington Levy is never going to cut much slack from the reggae purists, but Kahne’s shiny production puts too much distance between Light and Matisyahu’s earlier work … I’m going back to my Bob Marley, Clash and Ruts DC …