Album: Burning Spear, Marcus Garvey/ Garvey's Ghost (Island)

As with Marley, so with the Spear: their best work was not necessarily to be found on the LPs which brought them to an international audience, but it is snobbery of the most egregious kind to pretend that those Island recordings are not in themselves great.

Especially in this case. Both Garvey and its ghost dub stand darkly among the most numinous records of the late 20th century – music of such incantatory sorrowfulness that they really require a category of their own. File under "beautiful".