After shaking cocktail music (and Fifties exotica) wide awake in his impossibly “cult” first album — Songs for Cabriolets, FA8565, released in year 2000 — Karl Zero made his musical comeback in 2005 when he hatched this “HiFi Calypso” after rising to meet a sizeable challenge: to lure Bob Marley’s legendary Wailers away from Jamaica, and then have them play mento and calypso, the genres that gave reggae its sources. Relying on his phony “frog” accent, singsong chat and debonair tenderness, Karl came up with 15 tracks that brimmed with sunshine. Every one of these is a sugarcane delight, with tasty flavours delicately aged in barrels of rum to produce this vintage postcard in sound.
