Deliverance

Deliverance is the only album by Baby D, the London breakbeat-hardcore group, and Systematic released it on 8 February 1996. The group took its name from its singer, which Caroline Sullivan, reviewing the record in the Guardian the next day, treated as the correct decision. Dance music of that decade had a habit of hiding the women who sang it. Here the voice is why the tunes could live on the radio. Music & Media described three musicians from London who had already ruled specialist dance charts and then crossed.

The album reached number 5 in Britain and number 47 in Switzerland. The plot is the singles. Let Me Be Your Fantasy, a 1994 number one, sits on the album: a plea over a break, long enough to be a club record and sung enough to be a pop one. The later singles kept the same argument, house and jungle and rave and pop in the proportion British dance used when those words still shared a chart. Sullivan heard a group that had put the singer’s name on the door. That is the useful review. The machines are the London ones. The reason to keep the album is the voice they were named for.

A lot of rave albums from the middle of the decade are compilations with a logo. This one is a group with one singer and a hit they refused to leave off the LP. Official Charts still lists Let Me Be Your Fantasy at number one. Deliverance is what they did with the year after that, and Britain put the album at number 5. One album. Then the name stops. The single is the thing the country remembers. The album is where you hear they had more than one song.

Sources

• Deliverance: Systematic, 8 February 1996, UK albums number 5, and Caroline Sullivan in the Guardian on 9 February 1996.
• Official Charts, Baby D: Let Me Be Your Fantasy at number one, and the later singles.