What A Feeling - Tony Curtis (Bacchanal)

2002 was producer "Lenky" Marsden's year. His Diwali rhythm on the 40/40 label, featuring Bounty Killer's magnificent Sufferer, was unquestionably the year's finest. Now, as 2002 bows out, Lenky matches that success all the way with the sensational Escape rhythm.

Escape has the loping, massive wind-and-go-down party vibe of a soca bassline, a Trinidadian influence perhaps reflected in the aptly named Bacchanal label. This is hard core party music, matched to perfection on What A Feeling by Tony Curtis' smooth as silk vocals, which positively ooze the commercial success that Lenky Marsden's production work deserves and will surely be the soundtrack to the opening months of 2003.

But alongside the trademark steely professionalism of every Lenky Marsden production is always a quintessentially Jamaican wackiness. Here this takes the form of a skirling Highland reel or jig which twirls its synthesised way through the grooves with kilts flying. Like many a deceptively smooth JA vocalist before him, to cite just Dennis Brown and Gregory Isaacs, Tony Curtis' vocals are heard at their best over a heavy duty production. Such workaday party lyrics as 'What a feeling, makes feel like I'm dancing on the ceiling' seem to point up the essential craziness at the heart of Lenky's production work more keenly than the rough and raw DJ cuts.

These include Like Wah, Cobra's tribute to the gangster life, Zumjay's Bad Man Don't Show Off, likewise a paean to the bad man and backed by Mr Vegas' Higher We Go, and Lexxus's fast-style We Don't Talk. This is backed by Ranking Taxi's utterly demented New Day-O sung literally in another language apart from the refrain 'daylight come and we want go home".

Since these are all double sided vocals, a final good reason for buying What A Feeling is that its B side alone holds the Escape rhythm in all its instrumental glory making it, in domino parlance, the key card. Only four cuts so far but don't be surprised if, like Lenky's aforementioned Diwali and Masterpiece rhythms, we don't end up with more than twenty.

December 2002