This review was first published in September 2024 (RIDDIM 04/2024).

Label: Overstand / Easy Star
Text: Davide Bortot
As if one still needed to say it out loud: we’ve all known since ”Lightning” that Mortimer’s music comes from deep within. It’s one of the most moving – and in many ways one of the deepest – love songs ever written, and the fact that he created this track, his defining track, a full five years after his official debut speaks volumes about who Mortimer is. In search of lost time? Mortimer isn’t searching for anything, he rather accepts that the spirit has to find him: that true art can only emerge from a true moment.
That moment has finally arrived. Another five years after ”Lightning,” the accompanying album is here – ”accompanying” in the sense that the vulnerability making that song so special is the same energy that shapes ”From Within.” That is Mortimer’s great contribution to the evolution of reggae: he’s added a new facet of masculinity to a genre still marked by archaic rituals and rigid ideas of strength. He’s made it – as one might say today – a little less toxic.
The album opens with two classic conscious tunes, ”In My Time” featuring Damian Marley and ”Bruises” with Kabaka Pyramid and Lila Iké. They cover discrimination and false narratives as tools of power, post-colonial trauma and structural racism as the ongoing aftershock of slavery. These are typical reggae themes, but Mortimer approaches them in his very own way. Instead of posing as the all-knowing revealer or hyper-potent avenger, he speaks with unflinching honesty about the pain and scars he himself carries. On ”Not A Day Goes By,” he becomes even more explicit about his personal abysses and mental struggles.
But ”From Within” isn’t all darkness. On the contrary: ”Slowly” is a song for the love of his life, and a touching declaration of devotion. On ”My Child,” Mortimer tells his children that everything can (!) turn out alright: ”The pain is not the enemy, grow stronger from the hurt.” And toward the end of the album, there’s a series of songs that wrestle with the existential importance of personal growth. It’s this dialectic that defines ”From Within”: yes, there is darkness, but there is also light. Despair and hope. Fragility and grounding. Wounds and healing.
Musically, too, the album brings together different moods and temperatures. In close collaboration with Mortimer himself, producer Winta James (for the uninitiated: Damian Marley, Chronixx, Protoje, Jesse Royal, Samory I – you get the idea) has created his masterpiece here. Within his guiding idea of contemporary soul rebel music, every riddim, every arrangement, every sound feeds into the message of each song and the arc of the album as a whole. When Mortimer revisits his childhood on ”Balcony Swing,” it sounds like a Sunday afternoon on an imaginary ‘80s radio station. The relationship song ”Rather Be” transports Jennifer Lara’s lovers-rock classic ”I’m In Love” into the now. The forward-looking ”My Child” rides on a no-nonsense steppers beat. And toward the end, as despair slowly dissolves into confidence, Winta even pulls a seven-minute disco-reggae jam. On top of that, there are three dub versions by Tippy I Grade, who quite literally cannot miss right now.
An epochal album from one of the most important singers of our time. Anything less would not do.

