You don’t change a winning recipe. That of Prince Fatty, sound engineer and producer, has not budged an inch since the excellent "Survival of the Fattest", whose release was ultimately aborted in France in 2007. With "Supersize", this Englishman who has crossed paths with Lily Allen, Graham Coxon, Gregory Isaacs and Sinead O’Connor plays from the same score. You might even think these 11 tracks came from the same sessions: the same reggae played old-school but with modernity, the same endorsement from the genre’s veterans... and the same obsession with corpulence.
As on the previous opus, the faithful Little Roy, Dennis Alcapone and Winston Francis come to inhabit the compositions, between rocksteady, reggae and dub. Energetic bass, essential organ: the ingredients are still there and work wonderfully, whether on Dry your tears with Winston Francis, with its old-fashioned atmosphere, or Christopher Columbus with Little Roy ("my reggae professor", as Prince Fatty calls him). Hollie Cook, daughter of the Sex Pistols’ drummer, delivers a dub version of her own track, That very night, with Dennis Alcapone.
The result is just as successful when Prince Fatty covers two hip-hop standards: Shimmy Shimmy Ya (by the brilliant Old Dirty Bastard) and Insane in the Brain (the Cypress Hill classic), which closes the album with an inspired Horseman whose flow at times recalls Shaggy’s. Like these two tracks, Prince Fatty has found an ideal compromise between old and new. While the album is resolutely anchored in the golden hours of reggae and rocksteady, its modernity is undeniable. A real treat.
