Commodores - Nightshift

I never liked Lionel Richie, and honestly never really gave two shits about the Commodores. I didn't want to count how many times she was a lady. When Lionel fancied himself the third wheel to the Prince / Michael Jackson milking stool I had to suffer through Can't Slow Down when I was at my girlfriend's house. She also loved the Cats Soundtrack too ... ah the blush of a first love. I will say though that I did love Louis Shelton's guitar solo on "Hello" - you gotta give credit where credit is due. It was a weird thing when I found myself strangely enamoured with "Nightshift."

I found the album cheap back in the day and I think I played it once before filing it away. I did pull the title track off for a few mix tapes but I never really gave the album a chance. I listened once and passed judgment and that was that.

During my recent trip to Krazy Bob's to flip through his discount bins I found several copies of Nightshift, and each time I saw a copy I kept thinking to myself, "You know, that one song was pretty bloody good. Who knows, there may be more hidden in the grooves." He'd been seeding the bins too since I'd been last, and there were quite a few albums tucked under my arm. I had no intention of getting any more records, but then there it was ... an absolutely near mint copy of Nightshift.

I heard the little voice chime in, "You never know."

Being of strong will and resolve, I caved.

Now let's be completely transparent here, I was never really the intended target audience for this one. At the time I was a 21 year old skinny white kid who loved rock and roll and anything else was by extension shit. Of course, as I was in charge of what I considered "rock and roll," occasionally other stuff crept in, but generally I wasn't all that keen on R&B or disco, or Madonna, or Culture Club, or Michael Jackson ... or Prince. You get the idea.

Well, here I am four decades later playing an album by the Commodores and I am listening with intent. Oh make no mistake this still isn't my preferred genre but I have a little more appreciation for pop in general than I once did.

Nightshift was produced by Dennis Lambert who had previously produced acts like The Righteous Brothers, Glen Campbell's "Rhinestone Cowboy" and "Baby Come Back" by Player in '77. The band also enlisted Peter Wolf (not that one, the other one) to help with arrangements and instrumentation on five of the album's nine tracks.

I guess Motown figured that with Lionel on one side, and the remaining Commodores on the other, the label would be able to have their cake and eat it too. Nightshift is tightly crafted and deliberately executed. There was nothing new here, and despite being so meticulously executed, it ultimately boils down to a simple ingredient that either works or doesn't. The songs.

There are a couple of bright spots: the title track, which still inexplicably gets me in the feels, and the album's opening cut, the very Michael Jacksonish "Animal Instincts," complete with the little squeals and ooh oohs. Even "Slip of the Tongue" that opens the second side is kind of fun. However, the album is mostly sort of pleasantly meh. Nightshift would be the last album to go gold, which was better than their previous outing, but their platinum days were far behind them.

They're still out there picking up the occasional shift.

Styx - Paradise Theater

Styx was hands down one of my favourite bands as a kid. They were a strange band, even back then. They were a hard rock band, almost progressive at times, who had a penchant for sucky ballads. I know there's a tendency for people to zero in on "Babe" as the song that killed the band's credibility. The roots go way back to almost the beginning when Styx released "Lady" on their second album. It showed a side to the band that needed to be kept in check, and for the most part the band kept things on a pretty tight leash. The band had been setting a gruelling pace, releasing an album a year (two in 1972) and by the time they released Paradise Theater (if I end up writing theatre later it's because that's how we spell it here) in 1981 they'd dropped ten albums in less than a decade. I snapped this up as soon as I saw it, and it became a fixture on my turntable. Like the band had announced on "Borrowed Time" from 1979's Cornerstone , ...

Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and it was one of the albums I really wanted to get back after a basement flood wiped out my vinyl collection in the '90s (when no one really gave a shit about records, and my insurance gave me a couple hundred bucks for an appraised $10,000 collection). Way back in 1984, my (dearly departed and greatly missed) buddy Dave let me borrow his cassette copy, which included a bonus track of "Get It On (Bang A Gong)." When I eventually bought the album, I didn't know it was a bonus track, or even what a bonus track was. If that sentence was hard to read, just go back and skim it. I'm sure you'll get the gist. I'd find out later Billy was an off-and-on-again member of Nazareth and wrote some absolutely killer songs for them. At the time, though, all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the opening cut, "Baby Come Back," then proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another bef...

Garfield - Strange Streets

I'd seen this before in the bin, but kept flipping through the stacks. I'd see it a few more times, each time stopping to look at it a little more. There was something kind of cool about the cover where the stylized Celtic knot had the dotted yellow line - it was a strange street for sure. I pulled the record out of the jacket and I was struck by the centre image. There was the familiar Mercury label, the same one I'd seen a thousand times on BTO's Head On album. Well, I'd bought things based on odd associations before - like when I had to buy anything that Solid Rock Records released (this was generally a good thing) - so who knows, maybe this was a hidden gem. There weren't any real scratches or rash, just a lot of dirt and dust. It seemed to clean up okay, but we'll see how it goes. The album opens with the title track, and this wasn't straight-ahead pop or rock. It was leaning toward the progressive, but with a pop bent. Oddly enough, the vocals rem...

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