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Review

Album Review: Bitty McLean - The Taxi Sessions

09/10/2013

by Angus Taylor

Butter-wouldn’t-melt-voiced Birmingham singer Bitty McLean and Jamaican production juggernaut Sly & Robbie started their musical relationship in 2006. Three years later they had recorded both a live album in Japan and a studio set, Movin’ On. Bitty has appeared on stage with the drum and bass twosome on many occasions - including on their famous collaborations with Ernest Ranglin and Shaggy.

For 2012 the trio released It’s Running Over, their long-awaited cover of Freddie McKay’s Your Cup Is Full, as a 12” discomix featuring veteran deejay Josey Wales. (A video of the rehearsals for the song has been on the net since 2010.) Now Bitty and the Riddim Twins’ second studio longplayer is here: on a choice of abridged vinyl LP and a CD/digital edition with bonus material. Overall, The Taxi Sessions exemplifies the smooth reggae for grownups we heard on Movin’ On. However, fans of It’s Running Over will be pleased that it continues Mclean’s journey towards being more of a roots singer. (2013 looks like a big year for Sly & Robbie, with signs that their heavily anticipated Shaggy album is ready to drop.)

While classic reggae has often made a virtue of the contrast between a rough voice and smooth rhythms or vice versa - here Bitty’s vocals and Sly & Robbie’s vintage 80s backings are equally shiny and clean. The effect is so bright and twinkly that it takes a second listen just to adjust ones ears to what's going on beneath the gleam. Like Movin’ On the arrangements are a mingling of digital and live instruments – courtesy of Jamaican legends Mikey Chung and Dougie Bryan (guitar) and Ansell Collins, Winston Wright and Robbie Lyn (keyboards) plus modern horn overdubs from Frenchmen Guillaume Stepper Briard and Didier Bolay. Bitty likes to mix his own albums and everything has a unified clear crystalline sheen. It makes sense that, as well as the usual platforms, a hi-def download option is planned for audiophile sites Quobuz and HDtracks.

Movin’ On surprised people by supplementing McLean’s romantic staples with a couple of roots and culture anthems - Jahovia and Plead My Cause. Here these themes actually outnumber the love messages to take up the lion’s share of topics. Blessings By The Score asks us to praise Jah atop the heavily re-versioned Revolution backing. There's also a sheet metal clanging remix of Plead My Cause on the Guess Who's Coming to Dinner rhythm. On the CD version Running Over appears as a vocal cut without Josey Wales – anchored by the black hole pull of Robbie’s bass on the Shine Eye Gal.

And for his traditional lovers rock audience, McLean reworks American soul as he did on Movin’ On. The Impressions’ I'm The One Who Loves You, memorably covered by Cornel Campbell, is given an extraordinary celestial choral treatment in dub.

Beautifully built, elegantly sung and polished to the point where you can see your reflection in it, this is up to the pristine standards we expect from everyone involved. At a trim eight tracks on LP and ten on CD/download, there are no fillers. But it does raise the question of how nice it would be to hear Bitty, Sly & Robbie go even further with an all roots, all live instruments album next time.

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