Album: Sean Paul

The Trinity, Atlantic

The resilience of Jamaican music is amazing. Every so often, a new star emerges from this tiny island to demonstrate the extraordinary capacity of reggae to reinvent itself in a fresh, invigorating form. Latest in the line stretching back through Shaggy and Shabba is Sean Paul. With five hit singles and six million sales, his Dutty Rock album proved the most globally infectious brand of dancehall in recent years. As he boasts in "Change the Game" here, "We flip the switch and the game just change/ Dutty Cup music drive them insane". The Trinity is more of the same, with little advance in musical style or lyrical themes, which focus on matters pulchritudinous, set to propulsive, twitchy electro grooves. "Throw them bones/ Gal move up your body/ Let me see you're full grown," Paul demands in "Head in the Zone", elsewhere wondering when his girl is going to put out in "Give It Up to Me", and smugging it up something rotten with rising star Wayne Marshall in "Yardie Bone". "We be burnin'/ And concernin'/ What nobody wanna say," he claims elsewhere, but it appears to be yet more of the same. Other than token calls for peace and tributes to departed friends, nothing halts Trinity's slick, hedonistic progress. It should emulate its predecessor's success.