Exodus

The subtractive test finds load-bearing parts and slack in about equal measure. Natural Mystic must open: it fades in from silence, the warning arrives before the band does, and the record begins as a thing already in motion. Exodus must close the first side, since its length is the march, and One Love must close the record, since the sermon of side one needs its answer in fellowship. Between these the test bites. So Much Things to Say and The Heathen state what Guiltiness and Exodus state better; either could go with little loss. Turn Your Lights Down Low duplicates Waiting in Vain in a softer register, and Three Little Birds is a charm whose place, rest after the march, is real but thin. The plan is required; several of the songs that fill it are not.

Score: 7.7 / 10

The disclosure can be stated: a people held in Babylon, the system of the powerful, is a people already in motion, and the movement is at once political and sacred; the oppressor’s guilt is carried, not hidden, by “the big fish” who eat the small; and love, play and rest are not escapes from the struggle but its fruit. Exodus states the first plainly, “Movement of Jah people”, a claim about a diaspora and not a mood. So Much Things to Say puts the condition into history: Garvey sold “for rice”, the prophet betrayed by his own. The sound discloses as fully. Held below the bar: the statement is made more often than deepened, side two discloses a feeling more than a meaning, and the condition had been stated more sharply on the band’s earlier records.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Height comes often and is of one kind: warmth with weight under it. Natural Mystic is the summit, the fade-in from nothing, the slow pulse, the voice warning of a thing “blowing through the air”, prophecy rendered as weather. Exodus rises by accumulation, horns, the answering chorus, a bass that never moves off its figure, until repetition becomes transport. Waiting in Vain reaches beauty in its melody and in Junior Marvin’s guitar break. One Love lifts at the close, a hymn sung as a dance. The frequency is held down by the middle of side one, which drives rather than rises, and by Jamming, Turn Your Lights Down Low and Three Little Birds, which are pleasure and charm. Grandeur and terror appear only as menace; the record is not dreadful where it could have been.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Here the record builds rather than evokes, in one place, and the place bears its name. The exodus of Israel is taken as the pattern of the African diaspora’s return to Zion, as Rastafari reads it, and the title track makes it load-bearing: the people of Jah leaving Babylon, the call to “look within” before setting out, Moses invoked as the precedent. The particular stays particular: the record was made in exile, in London, by a man shot at in his own house, and the title is its circumstance as well as its scripture. Around the frame Natural Mystic is prophecy, Guiltiness judgement, The Heathen a call to fallen fighters, One Love the gathered people. Held below the bar: one track builds the myth, side two leaves it, and the arrival in Zion is implied by a change of subject, not built.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The inheritance is roots reggae as the Wailers themselves had remade it for an international public since Catch a Fire (1973): Jamaican rhythm and Rastafarian speech in an album built for rock’s audience, with rock guitar and Island’s finish. The record turns along that path, not off it. The turns are real and modest: a title track held past any song form, close in spirit to dub’s extension; the open division into a militant side and a love side; a softer, rhythm and blues address on side two. The stake was in the moment, a record made in exile weeks after an attempt on its maker’s life that chose to end in love songs and so risked the charge of softening. That stake is moral more than formal, and the swerve is a refinement: that is what holds the axis lowest. It stands well below Low at 8.9 and Remain in Light at 8.6.

Score: 7.6 / 10

Would a different form change what the record knows? Partly. The sequence is counted here, once. The two-sided plan is the instrument of one thought: the march out of Babylon on side one, and on side two the life the march was for, love, play, rest and the gathering of One Love. Reverse the sides or mix the songs and the record says only that its maker wrote political songs and love songs. The title track’s form is its knowledge: the march is a vamp because a people’s movement does not resolve within a song, and the length enacts it. Natural Mystic fades in because the prophecy was already sounding. Held lower because most songs inside the plan are in a common form, verse and chorus over the one-drop, and could be exchanged among the band’s records without loss to what they know.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Evidence over forty-nine years. The record keeps yielding in use: its songs are sung where their maker never saw them, One Love as an anthem of a nation and of its tourist board, Three Little Birds as a consolation sung to children and at funerals, the word exodus carried into political speech. Each use returns to the song and finds it holding. Musicians keep returning to the Barretts’ rhythm section as a school of the one-drop. The semantic depth lies in the Rastafarian theology, which repays the listener who knows the scripture and Garvey behind it. What holds the axis: re-examination of the album as an album, rather than of its maker or of reggae, is thinner, formal return finds less than in records whose structure is the object of study, and much of the use returns to four songs rather than to the whole.

Score: 7.9 / 10

The field is popular music of 1977, and reggae’s place in it. The intrinsic force is moderate. The record did not reorganise what reggae could be built on; that had been done in Kingston, by the Wailers among others, and by dub. What it showed is that a Rastafarian roots record could hold a militant theology and a pop sequence in one album and reach the centre of the international market. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: five of its ten songs are on Legend (1984), the compilation through which much of its presence travels; One Love has become an anthem of a nation; the rhythm section is studied as a school. Much of that reach is the career and the genre, not this record’s turn, and practice did not change on its account.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Survival is weighed over forty-nine years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the album survives as issued, in print throughout, reissued and remastered. Presence is of the widest kind: the title track, One Love, Three Little Birds, Jamming and Waiting in Vain are heard on every continent, in broadcast and in public use, by listeners born decades after it. Charged: much of that presence travels through the singles and through Legend, not through the album heard whole. The fabric dates little, a live band in a good room with few period timbres beyond some keyboard tones. It stands level with Let It Bleed at 8.8, and a tenth above Low and Remain in Light at 8.7, whose spans are the same or near it and whose presence is narrower.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, and the making is load-bearing in the rhythm section. Carlton Barrett’s drums and Aston Barrett’s bass hold the one-drop with an economy that is the record’s ground: the bass figure of Exodus carries more than seven minutes without the repetition going slack. The I Threes are arranged as a chorus and a congregation, answering rather than decorating. Marley’s voice moves from the hushed warning of Natural Mystic to the sweetness of Waiting in Vain with full control, and the London production is clean and spacious, each part placed. The faults: several arrangements are routine for the band, the title track leans on repetition more than build in its later minutes, and the polish smooths edges the Kingston records kept. It stands below Low at 9.0 and Remain in Light at 8.7, above Zooropa at 8.2.

Score: 8.5 / 10

One law governs the sound: the one-drop at a single unhurried tempo band, the Barretts underneath, the I Threes answering, the voice above. The two most distant elements are Guiltiness, judgement on the powerful, and Turn Your Lights Down Low, a bedroom song. Do they obey one law? In sound, entirely: no track is fast, and none is a ballad without the beat. In meaning, only through the theology the record assumes, love as Jah’s and rest as the end of the march. The record states that link once, in One Love, and leaves the listener to supply it across side two. The seam between the sides is visible. The range is moderate, narrow in tempo and texture and wide in subject, and coherence across it is achieved by sound more than by law.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. The sacred is held, Jah and Zion, in the frame of the whole. The state and its powerful are held as Babylon, in Guiltiness and the title track. History is held: slavery and Garvey in So Much Things to Say, the diaspora in the title. The couple is held across side two, desire, waiting and rest; the natural order appears in Natural Mystic and in the birds at the doorstep; the people as a gathered body is the close. That is a wide span for thirty-seven minutes. What holds the figure lowest is integration: the orders are joined by the theology, but laid out side by side, judgement here and love there, and only One Love and the title track hold more than one order in one song. Labour and the family are absent.

Score: 7.6 / 10