Colourful anthems to black-rock movement *** 1/2 living colour "time's up" epic : albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor) to five (a classic). :

“Elvis Is Dead” trumpets the gleeful, attention-getting track on this second album from the hard-driving leaders of the black-rock movement. Well, so are Malcolm X and Jimi Hendrix, but that

doesn’t stop them from being big influences on this group. And it doesn’t stop Elvis either--the frenzied abandon with which this quartet often plays can be traced in part back to the

Pelvis himself. The point of the song, which does acknowledge Elvis as a great performer, is that he was just the first _ white_ rock apostle--it’s certainly no coincidence that the song

locomotes along to a metalized James Brown riff. So it’s no surprise that in “Solace of You,” when Corey Glover sings “Gotta go inside, back where it started,” he means Africa, a point

confirmed by the song’s South African-inspired township jive shuffle and Mandela-inspired message. Sound like a black-rock manifesto? It is, as was the band’s 1988 debut album, “Vivid.” But

thanks to matured songwriting and that frenzied abandon (highlighting Vernon Reid’s jazz-informed metal-master guitar heroics) it’s much more than that: a rousing collection that rocks hard

and rolls poetically, and that will be best appreciated by the colorblind--but not the col_ our_ blind. MORE TO READ