Katchafire: Slow burning

Herald rating: * * * *

If summer turns our minds reggae-wards then thank Bob for Katchafire.

Like their great debut last year, their second album is a big throb of old-fashioned sunshine and a reminder of the music's fundamentals - that this was a music of tunes and words and anger and sweet restraint before the hard-disk mob went dub-crazy, and digitised and generally, well, Wellington-ised the whole idea ... Here, the phrase "reggae got soul" springs to mind throughout.

No, Katchafire don't break new ground. They start with a song titled Roots Music and end with one called Rude Girl. And there isn't much of an extension of vocabulary in the other nine tracks.

Musically they are the Datsuns of reggae - as much in love with Bob Marley and the Wailers as their Waikato compadres are with Deep Purple.

But boy, it's hard to fault the eight-piece's rocksteadiness when tracks like Close Your Eyes - a summertime hit surely - or Human Bonding are causing a rise in room temperature with its bubbling groove and good humoured lyric ("if you want to play it cool / I'll just stay at home and clean my pool").

It's not all fun'n'games, however. On Frisk Me Down the strident rhythm and melancholy brass supports a variation of stand-up-for-your-rights squarely aimed at the local constabulary ("don't frisk me down because of my brown skin"), as does the Rasta-righteousness I and I.

Things head way out of town on the palm-tree sway of the Pasifikan-influenced Rainbow, while Rude Girl - with toasting by Tuff Chant and a few phrases lifted from a certain Outkast hit - heads somewhere between Jamaica and Spain.

Elsewhere the horn section, Mister Gang, gives some of the sort of parp-power - especially in those trombone solos - that reminds of the great Brit ska bands of the late 1970s.

But Marley remains the touchstone throughout, from the artwork through to the palette of sounds to the grooves, some of which show signs of the band's other life as a reggae jukebox playing Exodus into the wee small hours in heartland pubs.

This shows their own songbook is coming along nicely and as torch-bearers for old-school reggae Katchafire have hoisted that flame higher and brighter.