Catch a Fire stands alongside some of rock's great debut LPs. Of course, the Wailers had been making great low-budget records for years in Jamaica--first as a vocal trio and then as a band--but this first effort for Chris Blackwell's Island label in 1973 is the one that broke reggae music into an international market (and finally gave them some dough as well). Bob Marley's "Stir It Up" had been a major pop hit in America and Europe the year before via a cover version by Johnny Nash, priming the market for reggae, but nothing prepared the world for Marley songs like "Concrete Jungle" and "Slave Driver", which fully revealed Marley's seemingly mystical political militancy. Marley's magic was already there, for sure, but Peter Tosh's "Stop That Train" and "400 Years" both display why Tosh and Marley together made a peerless reggae music team. --Bill Holdship
