It's almost too easy to review a reggae album that features covers of "Hotel California," Al Green's "Let's Stay Together," and (eek) Hot Chocolate's "You Sexy Thing." The former two are actually not horrible (the latter is plenty horrible), but the selection of such overdone songs reflects such a paucity of imagination that you can't take an album like this seriously. I try to cut Carlton Coffie some slack, though, seeing as he helped spawn the second coming of Inner Circle after Jacob Miller's death in 1980 seemingly ended the band's run. Instead, they reinvented themselves with a more pop bent, recording some excellent mainstream reggae in the mid-'80s and scoring the iconic "Cops" anthem "Bad Boys." He and the band further broke through in the '90s with the monster hit "Sweat (A La La La La Long)," establishing his as one of the best singing voices in reggae. Indeed, it still is, though it's a shame it isn't put to better use than this album. The opening song, "One Race," strides the fine line between pop and utter cheese that Coffie negotiated in Inner Circle but manages to stay (barely) on the good side, despite a Hallmark chorus like "One race, and it's the human race." "Not a Laughing Matter," "Power and the Glory," and "Roadblock" likewise sound like they could've been decent album cuts from Bad Boys, but that's as good as you'll get on Scandal. I imagine that "You Sexy Thing" (which, amazingly enough, was chosen as a single) is best enjoyed by the deaf, while "Put It On" is a Marvin Gaye-striving ballad that should never have strived for anything. "Reasons" is a better ballad, but certainly nothing most reggae fans want to hear. Meanwhile, the title track sounds like some sort of 1980s public domain tune, though it might be outdone in terms of sheer saccharine cheesiness (Is there such a thing as sweet cheese?) by "That's How Strong," whose chorus can be described only as "Amy Grant-like." Adding insult to injury, most of these tracks were repackaged two years later, along with remakes of "Bad Boys" and "Sweat," for the desperate-sounding album Bad Boys 2000.