Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros: Streetcore

In the two years leading up to his death last December, Joe Strummer had begun to make sense of his life's work: putting the populism back in pop music, and the rock back in punk rock. Global A Go-Go, Strummer's second album with the eclectic beat merchants in The Mescaleros, was as snappy and smart as anything he'd recorded since The Clash broke up, and what remains of the posthumous album Streetcore shows that he was still inspired up to the moment he died. Hellcat Records has released Streetcore in its rough form, with whatever takes and mixes were completed before Strummer's death, and in a way, the tinny sound and half-finished feel makes it seem more touching and direct than the final result might otherwise have been. Streetcore has a notebook-like quality: It's packed with Strummer's first impressions on how to keep blurring the lines between "underclass" pop from around the world. The stirring opener "Coma Girl" makes the best effort, sporting a gruff-but-emotive Strummer vocal and a sketchy-but-charged structure that rolls from ska-like chanting to hooky power-pop. Elsewhere, "Get Down Moses" presents one of Strummer's "bouncing through the Third World" hoedowns, "Arms Aloft" rattles and stings its way toward an anthemic chorus, and the booming Britpop of "All In A Day" mingles club beats and buzzing guitar in a way that comes off like Strummer showing Mick Jones how Big Audio Dynamite should have sounded. At several points on Streetcore, Strummer growls out the words "This is London calling," most notably on the slow, sinewy "Midnight Jam." The words serve as a nod to The Clash's legacy, of course, but also as an acknowledgment of the global community from one man who really listened to what was being beamed into his stereo. As Streetcore closes with the fiddle-aided "Silver And Gold" (a remodeling of Bobby Charles' "Before I Grow Too Old"), Strummer once again affirms his legacy as one of the most humane artists of the rock era.