Catch a Fire (Deluxe Edition)

Island’s expanded reissue of Bob Marley’s watershed album provides some much needed perspective on Marley’s meteoric ascent to stardom. The first album of the set gives fans a glimpse of Catch a Fire in its original Jamaican mix, while the second contains the overdubbed, Chris Blackwell supervised version that ultimately garnered Marley and the Wailers so much recognition. Bob Marley was already a hardened veteran of the Jamaican music scene by the time that Catch a Fire saw release in the spring of 1973. He had recorded low-slung New Orleans style R&B with Leslie Kong, soaring Rocksteady with Coxsone Dodd and adventurous, uncompromising Roots music with the inimitable Lee Perry. Had his career ended in 1972 Marley would still be one of the preeminent figures in Jamaican music, but the release of Catch a Fire, one of the first internationally distributed Roots records, set Marley on the path to global superstardom and changed the general public’s conception of reggae forever. From the plaintive ghetto reportage of “Concrete Jungle” to the sufferers’ manifesto “400 Years,” Marley, along with fellow Wailers Bunny Marley and Peter Tosh, gives us a street level view of Kingston life with his stunning melodic sensibility and deft lyricism, and Catch a Fire remains one of the most revelatory Jamaican albums ever recorded.