taken from- Reggae.be

aangemaakt door Jah Rebel

For ‘Pause’, his first album without his regular backing band Adowa, Taj Weekes was inspired by the events of the past year, in which the COVID-19 pandemic in particular dealt a sledgehammer blow to the music world and imposed a long forced break on musicians.
Taj Weekes: “This album was written during the most important year of my life. The year the music stopped and about everything else in between.”. The first references to that past period can already be heard in opener ‘Bang Bang’, in which Weekes sings, among other things: “…no missiles or microbe scan tear us apart, we all come together, one aim and one heart!”, but striking. What’s more, the tracklist of ‘Pause’ is that several of the 10 tracks on the album are substantively related, as if it were two sides of a coin.

For example, you have ‘Rainstorm’, a song with the genius chorus: “Ain’t it funny that the rain comes to take and wash away, all that you’ve set aside for a rainy day?”, which immediately does. recalling last summer’s devastating floods, and ‘Shelter In Place’, one of our personal favorites on ‘Pause’, and a duet with Ghanaian artist Duke D2, in which Taj poignantly describes the harrowing living conditions of the countless families with low describes incomes, which had little message to the one and a half meter society during the lockdown: “…shelter in place, in a cramped little space, safe distance we can’t keep, when there’s only room to sleep…”. It is also in this song that Weekes hints at the title of the album: “I cannot take a pause, simply just because, there’s so much left to do…”. ‘Easter Sunday’, referring to the populist statements of ex-President Donald Trump who wanted to open the American economy again by Easter Sunday 2020, will have a “sequel” with ‘False Choice’: “It’s a false choice, money over life. That’s a false choice, eyes on economic price. Trickle down, bubble up, trying to fill that overflowing cup. Downplay, downplay, there are million lives at bay, you can wish it all away, but not by Easter Sunday!”. Along the same lines is ‘Crisis’: “Fly open too soon, here comes the next wave, uncertainty looms, a novel virus. It’s allright to come out slowly, it’s allright to bend the curve, and will history see you clearly, for your greed and not your verve? Come on the water is safe, no need for testing! If you come out too late, we’ll lose investments!”, and Weekes concludes with the ‘March Of The Silent’, a song for which Taj used sound clips from Black Lives Matter manifestations (“No justice, no peace!”, “Hands up, don’t shoot!”).

Lyrically, ‘Pause’ is the strongest album we’ve heard in ages and it also holds up effortlessly musically. That forced break certainly did Taj Weekes good!