The Fittest

Serious roots reggae fans of a certain age will recognize Earl Sixteen's name immediately: though never a truly major star, over the past four decades he has made significant recordings with such top-ranked producers as Derrick Harriott and Lee "Scratch" Perry. Now in his fifties, he seems to be at the peak of his powers. The Fittest finds him teamed up with a solid group of Dutch session musicians and the production team of Manu Genius and Marc Baronner; the grooves they provide are strictly rootswise, the production style clean but not overly slick, and the songs are uniformly very good. (Maybe a bit too uniformly; a certain sameyness creeps in by about two-thirds of the way through the album, but luckily it's a very attractive sameyness.) Earl himself is in absolutely excellent voice; he sounds very much the way he did in the '70s, his crooning tenor voice a thing of beauty. Best of all, the songs are all presented in "showcase" style: each vocal version segues seamlessly into a dub mix, one of them offering the added bonus of a DJ performance by the legendary U-Roy. The cover lists each version as a separate track, but there is no audible separation between each pair. It's hard to identify highlights, but "Modern Slavery" and his smoky version of William DeVaughn's R&B classic "Big Car" are both especially good.