T.O.K. are a four-man dancehall version of the time-tested boy band formula-- high angelic harmonies bleeding into hard, guttural toasting, with enough hooks to supply an entire coastal fishing town. "Fire Fire", for instance, is transcendent, epic, gorgeous dance music, a dizzy, sticky helium chorus over a bleepy soca synth line and disco-call whistles, so fast that it seems ready to spin out of control at any second.
So it goes on Unknown Language, the group's second LP. From the urgent clarion-call staccato keyboards of "Hey Ladies" to the ethereal choir-synths and impossibly heavy drum hits of "No Way Jose" to the handclappy playground Coolie Dance chanting of the title track, nearly every track on the LP is a glittering and giddy. The production has an omnivorous reach, squeezing in frisky, heavy Latin piano and reggaeton drums on "She Hotter" and howling, wordless Middle-Eastern chanting on "Neck Breakers". And the members' voices, ranging from the throaty, gravelly Bounty Killer-esque growl of Flexx to the creamy, squeaky high croon of Bay-C, weave into a fluid, seamless harmonic tapestry on breathtaking chorus after breathtaking chorus. These songs, almost without exception, are about girls and partying, but party music is rarely this urgently, transcendently joyous.
When cognitive dissonance does raise its head, it's on "Wah Gwan", a track that with a greasy, squelchy Booker T organ and a clickety-clack drum pattern, seems to be a homeland-pride anthem at first but turns out to be a lament about Jamaica's epidemic violence: "Me no like wah gwan/ Too much innocents are dead; wah gwan?" And the floating, angelic "Footprints", which rests on acoustic guitars and one of the old-school drop beats currently popular in Jamaica, is something like T.O.K.'s version of TLC's "Waterfalls", a sad, simple elegy for kids killed by random violence and rendered homeless by abject poverty in a poor, dangerous country. If the party needs to slow down for a minute, it needs to slow down for a track like this.
