Review: The Selecter's 'Live and Rare From the Vaults'

The Selecter are one of Britain's key ska revivalists, having bashed out such sweaty classics as "Three Minute Hero" and "Too Much Pressure". Secret Records' new comp Live and Rare From the Vaults mostly catches them in less frantic mode, but there's a strong live side on which Pauline Black shows off her natural ease with a crowd and leads the band through some covers of classics such as Desmond Dekker's "007" and The Paragons' "The Tide Is High". 

The studio side gets started with a rendition of my personal favorite reggae smash, The Maytals' "Sweet and Dandy", but aside from a funky hip-hop-adjacent remix of "Radio Radical", the tracks on this side tend to be a bit too produced and polished. Coming from the late 1990s and early 2000s, these poppier tracks lack the teeth of The Selecter at their most vital, but they're still pretty okay. 

The sound is pretty okay too, with decent bass but an absence of mid tones and treble that edges a little too close to shrill, although it never quite distorts. The vinyl is flat and quiet though.