One of my favorite reggae bands right now are the Common Kings.
From the Orange County area of California, the group consists of members Jr. King (Sasualei Maliga) on vocals, Mata (Taumata Grey) on guitar, Uncle Lui (Ivan Kirimaua) on bass guitar and Big Rome (Jerome Taito) on drums. The group features a mixture of diverse backgrounds of Hawaiian, Samoan, Tongan and Fijian.
The group met while they were attending Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa and started the group in 2011. And while the groups are SoCal, in Hawai’i, the Common Kings get a lot of love.
It started back when the group released their song “Alcoholic”, their first song. And Hawai’i’s reggae stations gave the song airplay and their 2017 received a Grammy Award nomination for “Best Reggae Album” and also topped the Billboard Reggae albums chart and their 2018 EP, “One Day” reached number 2 on the chart.
The band has credited Hawai’i for their success. Member Mata has said in interviews that “if it wasn’t for Hawai’i and Hawai’i radio putting out our music, we wouldn’t be where we are now”.
The group have released a total of five albums & EPs amd recently their single “Happy Pill” and collaborated with Henry Fong for the song “Boom”.
For today, I am reviewing their EP “One Day” and it’s been on repeat in my car as I absolutely love this EP for its different styles of music.
The EP kicks off with the self-titled “One Day” and is truly addictive. About dreams of making a lot of money and everything about the lyrics to the music is catchy, making one want to sing and dance to the song. A fantastic song!
The second track is “Lock Me Up” featuring a collaboration with Stephen Marley. The Marley family have no doubt established strong ties with Hawai’i in the past few years, may it be Ziggy, Damian “Jr. Gong”, Julian and also Stephen. A wonderful collaboration with the popular producer, musician and singer, Stephen brings a wonderful rhythmic and lyrical flow in this collab.
The third track is titled “Today’s a New Day” featuring Miami hip hop group ¡MAYDAY!, a positive reggae/hip hop track. Love the music for this song from bass and acoustic guitar and heavy beats.
Possibly one of the biggest surprise is the fourth track which became one of my favorite tracks on the album. “Revolution” (EDM Reggae Mix) is an an awesome reggae track, but it’s that EDM vibe that is pronounced through the whole track that catches your attention. It was a bit unexpected after the first three tracks, but it’s become one of my favorite tracks on the album.
The fifth track is titled “Broken Crowns” and features a cool collaboration with Matisyahu, an America Jewish reggae singer, rapper and beatboxer. The sixth track features another Common Kings (non-collaboration) track “Slow Down” and the EP ends with a collaboration with Cuban-American singer, songwriter and rapper, Kat Dahlia.
One thing I like about “One Day” aside from the obvious of featuring cool music but also with the Common Kings being a group of mixed ethnicity but you have collaborations with artists from different backgrounds, Stephen Marley, son of Bob Marley, born in the US but was raised in Kingston, Jamaica, ¡MAYDAY! member Wrekonize is from London (raised on a cultured household of both British and African descent), Matisyahu who is American-Jewish (a music artist who has talked about discovering the different types of Jewish culture and credits Bob Marley as a musical inspiration) and Kat Dahlia, Cuban-American, who said Bob Marley was also a great influence on her musical style.
If anything, seeing the Common Kings collaborating with these musical artists of different backgrounds, I found that pretty awesome and the Common Kings have done a number of awesome collaborations with Jamaican reggae band Morgan Heritage with the 2018 track “Pineapple Wine Island Remix” which also featured Fiji, the 2019 song “Queen Majesty” with Sammy Johnson and The Green and recently with Henry Fong in 2020 for “Boom”.
But this Common Kings EP “One Day” is fantastic and it’s one of those EP’s that you can’t stop listening to over and over.
Recommended!
