Groundation - Candle Burning

Candle Burning is Groundation's eleventh album, and it recruits four generations of reggae royalty to help carry a message of hope rather than struggle.

The band tracked this one live to analogue tape at ICP Studios in Brussels across a single immersive ten-day session, the kind of constraint that tends to produce records with real cohesion rather than assembled perfection. It shows. Alpha Blondy, Mutabaruka, Thomas Mapfumo, and Mykal Rose all appear, an unlikely and genuinely moving cross-section of West African, Caribbean, and Jamaican reggae lineage sharing space with a California band that has spent decades earning the right to stand alongside them.

Energy opens the record exactly where the title points, horns and rhythm section locking in fast. The title track stretches past six minutes, the album's clearest spiritual statement, patient and unhurried in the way Groundation does best. Keeper of the Flame carries real weight in under four minutes, direct and unadorned, and Anew closes the record on a note of renewal rather than resolution, fitting for an album more interested in vitality than lament.

Nine tracks, four guest legends, one band that keeps proving they belong in that company rather than just alongside it.