Collie Buddz

A falsetto that combines the singsong lover’s rock appeal of a carnival crooner like Rupee with the deeper emotional catch of Bob Marley or Sizzla, Collie’s voice sits with equal comfort over the jump-up pace of ragga-soca, 4/4 hip-hop beats or an achingly slow one drop. Most strikingly on tunes like “My Everything” he finds both the drive of dancehall and the bluesy edge of roots in a frenetic polyrhythm built around the Latin horns of David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance,” an up-tempo track that could be just as home in a Trinidad carnival as a UK discothèque. “Some tunes I create are just to show that I could do anything I put my mind to,” he explains “to show the versatility of my style.” For many artists such versatility can be a curse and only a select few can maintain a distinctive voice when so many styles come so easy. But on tracks like “Moving On,” the layers of competing influences seem less like contradictions and more like necessary stages in the development of a larger persona, something like the succession of roles from pimp, to preacher, to something like a revolutionary that formed Malcolm X. Instead of pulling the song apart, the warring elements are all somehow essential to a larger vision reflected in his lyrics: “Feel like me cyan move an’ trap in a cage / still searchin’ for the words to put ‘pon the page…” It’s that discovery of timeless roots even within the sweatiest dancehall track that marks the culmination of Collie’s growth.

“Nowadays when I go to put on a CD, its old tune: Alton Ellis, The Meditations, The Heptones, Skatalites, Jacob Miller, Eric Monty Morris; love the rockers music. From that I start to teach myself some of the history of this music, that’s where I started to come a little more versatile with the singin’…the foundation just straight reality, yunno. I like dancehall, but de foundation and conscious tune really what me love.”