Shaggy and Sting, supergroup?
An unlikely pairing for album of the week.
For the first minute of 44/876, the new collaborative album from Shaggy and Sting that is hotly anticipated if only for its novelty, it sounds like the two musicians may just pull this thing off.
44/876 (out Friday) opens with its title track, beginning with a sunny verse from Shaggy celebrating his island roots over charmingly of-the-moment tropical-pop beats, hinting that the joining of forces between the English rocker and the Jamaican dance hall star may not be a total bust.
Then, Sting starts singing.
“It shakes me to my soul with a positive vibration, I start dreaming of Jamaica, the Caribbean nation,” he begins, the clunkiest possible introduction to the album’s “Sting does reggae!” concept, which gets only more amusing when he invokes “the ghost of Bob Marley that haunts me to this day” with all the nuance of a clueless tourist getting his hair cornrowed on an island holiday.
It’s a hilariously unfortunate introduction to an album that has its bright spots. Morning is Coming, the album’s second track, is a better introduction to Sting’s relative talents on 44/876, his lilting vocals a better match for the song’s gentle roots reggae. Of course, Sting is no rookie when it comes to the sounds of Jamaica, drawing from reggae and ska over the course of his career with the Police and in his solo work.
His pairing with Shaggy, best known for his 2000s run of singles including the Steve Miller-interpolating hit Angel and the novelty classic It Wasn’t Me, works best when the singers meet each other halfway between their respective comfort zones rather than step too far into each other’s worlds. That works both ways, as heard on Shaggy’s clunky attempts to match Sting’s cadences on the poppier Gotta Get Back My Baby.
The album’s lighthearted songwriting verges on treacly at points, mostly when Sting goes on storytelling tangents, jauntily quoting Lewis Carroll on
Just One Lifetime — “The time has come,” Shaggy said, “to talk of many things” — and role-playing a prisoner in front of Shaggy’s judge on Crooked
Tree before singing about “making the sweetest love” to a woman he nicknames “Sad Trombone” on the song of the same name.
He also seems quite keen to make his political opinions known, dedicating his first verse on 44/876 to complaining about how the “politics of this country is getting to me,” like a party guest determined to harsh the buzz.
Save for Sting’s more meandering moments, the album is mostly enjoyable, from its pleasant lead single Don’t
Make Me Wait to Dreaming in the U.S.A, the two singers’ Springsteen-in-Jamaica ode to the American dream.
44/876 may get its name from the phone country codes for the artists’ two home countries, England and Jamaica, but there’s something distinctly Amer- ican-feeling about the album, which sees both its creators as expats, with Shaggy pining for his island home and Sting unimpressed with the politics of Britain today.
Plus, only in America could this gonzo pairing of two stars at various levels of geezer-dom truly make sense. And while the world wasn’t exactly clamoring for this album, the end product is more lucid than many probably expected.
If anything, 44/876 is proof that both Shaggy and Sting can keep evolving into the later era of their careers and maintain a sense of humor about it in the process.