Rastaman Vibration will reach a larger audience than any of the Wailers' previous efforts …, a sizable portion of which will form their impressions of both reggae and the group based on its weight, factors which Marley has obviously taken into account.

Where before Marley placed an emphasis on the music's cultural foundations, the Jamaican ghetto plight and the transcendent Rastafarian vision, here the music and production receive the bulk of attention, and the result is a curiously rewarding ambiguity….

Marley's lyrical concerns, however, lack a focus and are notably deficient in dealing with the aforementioned themes of his previous work. The only socio-political exhortation here, War, is a rather stodgy rendition of a speech by Haile Selassie, while the most potent track, Johnny Was, is a sketchy, mysterious account of a man's death by "stray bullet," one of the finest things Marley has ever recorded. For the most...