Bob Marley & The Wailers

Bob Marley's Natty Dread captures his decisive transition from Wailers band member to auteur, with his singing and writing now front and center. The revamped band is securely reined in to his defiant, Rastafarian worldview.

This 1974 release mirrors the line-up's more sinewy sound, carved by Al Anderson's spidery guitar fills, Touter's telegraphic keyboard, the I-Threes' female vocal choruses, and vamping horns - a potent brew that bubbles under his most openly political songs. A position paper on the daunting ghetto realities of Jamaica's Trenchtown, the album reels off a series of enduring Marley classics.