VOICES - Hall & Oates

YEAR: 1980

LABEL: RCA

TRACK LISTING: How Does It Feel To Be Back, Big Kids, United State, Hard To Be In Love With You, Kiss On My List, Gotta Lotta Nerve (Perfect Perfect), You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin', You Make My Dreams, Everytime You Go Away, Africa, Diddy Doo Wop (I Hear the Voices)

IMPRESSIONS: Still stuck in the 80s this week with Hall & Oates big blockbuster. This album my mother actual bought because she was always a bigger Hall & Oates fan than I was. The big hits on this album I'm not really interested in; however this disc does contain some of my all-time favourite Hall & Oates songs. Their original version of "Everytime You Go Away" is a masterpiece and nothing like the light and puffy fluff Paul Young made of it; here it's a pain-packed, soulful smolder of a song. Then there's the two delightfully dippy winners "Africa" and "Gotta Lotta Nerve". The former is a "Lion Sleeps Tonight"-like romp where John Oates' girlfriend has gone to Africa and he's gotta go get her before "the lions and tigers try to jump on her bones" and the later is a nice piece of Daryl Hall vitriol with a sense of humour La Daryl is not generally known for. The big hits are pleasant enough listening but I've frankly heard them enough over the years due to the massive overplay they suffered at the time.

MY FAVOURITE TRACKS: Gotta Lotta Nerve (Perfect Perfect), Everytime You Go Away, Africa

FACT SHEET: VOICES is Hall & Oates' ninth album and the first they produced themselves. "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" is of course a cover of the Righteous Brothers song written by Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil and Phil Spector. This is the album whose new sound began Hall & Oates' domination of the music charts and MTV in the first half of the 1980s. The album has had a seeming multitude of covers but this black & white version was the first featuring raised embossed "sound waves" on the record sleeve. Paul Young would have a number one hit with a vastly inferior cover of "Everytime You Go Away" in 1985.