Ohio Players - Skin Tight CDs • Vinyl Records • LPs • Music Albums

while in small doses an apt shorthand for the inviting insouciance of the album — is banal, even for music that serves primarily for partying or dancing.

Despite the thinness of much of this record, though, the Ohio Players do threaten to become a major force in black rock. As the most commercial example of the innovative, insolent offspring of the Family Stone (along with the Funkadelic and Betty Davis), the group may be indispensable in popularly tempering the middle-of-the-road bent of current black music. Hints of what these men—who play their own instruments, write and arrange their own songs — can do are heard in "Is Anybody Gonna Be Saved?," which is constructed on a gospel framework with technical savvy and spiritual respect. The tune is undercut with philosophical despair and an angry questioning, the latter less alienating than that of Sly Stone. "Heaven Must Be Like This" draws even more successfully upon the Players' capabilities. It's an expansive, passionate ballad, radicalized with a judicious, lush use of the synthesizer, a bold harmonic blend and an outrageous. humorous · sensibility. These elements bend but don't shatter the tune's sound structure. (RS 166)

MARK VINING

Jive Turkey" was a major crossover moment of the 1970s, marking a period when African-American culture really began to dictate what was cool and what wasn't in the white mainstream. Beyond that, the song -- and the rest of this major label debut -- is dirty, filthy, glorious funk, the likes of which could only exist in the loose-as-a-goose atmosphere of the '70s.