I was a huge fan of René Marie’s previous two Motéma releases, Voice Of My Beautiful Country and Black Lace Freudian Slip. Amazingly, I Wanna Be Evil eclipses them both. From the dramatic first line of album opener ‘I’d Rather Be Burned As A Witch’ (“They say that I’m a witch and that I weave a spell”), this brilliant 10-track homage to her idol Eartha Kitt finds the singer in dazzling form. In addition to fine interpretations of classics such as ‘Santa Baby’ and a seriously raunchy ‘Let’s Do It’, we also get to hear lesser-known gems such as the massively swinging title track. The singer closes the album with the extraordinarily powerful and self-penned – yet suitably Kittish – ‘Weekend’. Having sworn in a radio interview that she’d never record a tribute album, René Marie has just produced one of the finest vocal jazz albums of 2013.