Elliot Martin joined John Brown’s Body as a backup singer on the band’s second album. Over the next ten years, his role grew to the point that he began sharing lead vocal and songwriting duties with founding bandleader Kevin Kinsella, and Martin gradually emerged as the more compelling and exciting songwriter. With Amplify, Kinsella is gone, and his departure reveals something interesting: while his melodies were dryer and his rhythms more spare and straightforward than Martin’s, he also exerted a certain amount of restraint on the band’s sound. And, unlike Martin’s, Kinsella’s lyrics were always coherent. Amplify is both a better and a worse John Brown’s Body album for being the first without Kinsella: the songs swirl in densely packed arrangements, and the rhythmic foundations are much more widely varied than in the band’s earlier, rootsier years. Martin writes some of the most gorgeous melodies in all of modern reggae music — if you can listen to “Sky Juice” and “Ghost Notes” (a heartbreaking tribute to the band’s late bassist Scott Palmer) without the hair rising on the back of your neck, then you should have your pulse checked. And on “Give Yourself Over” the entire band is at its blissfully uplifting best. But some of these lyrics still sound suspiciously like nonsense, and on the album’s title track the sonic density starts to sound suspiciously like an inability to make choices about what to leave in and what to take out. Still, those who thrilled to the wildly varied soundscape of Pressure Points will find plenty to love on Amplify. Highly recommended. – Rick Anderson