Wednesday, November 14, 2007

428. Sister Sledge - We Are Family (1979)
















Track Listing

1. He's The Greatest Dancer
2. Lost In Music
3. Somebody Loves Me
4. Thinking Of You
5. We Are Family
6. Easier To Love
7. You're A Friend To Me
8. One More Time

Review

More disco! We really haven't had enough of this yet, and unfortunately there is only one more album... I don't know if these are actually the only worthy disco albums or if the list is vastly under-represented.

That being said this is another pretty good disco album, it isn't as good as Chic, it is a bit more mellow with the exceptions of the three big hits here, but just for those three bit hits it is a good thing. The title track in its glorious 8 minutes length isn't as irritating as you might think. The extended length gives it a hidden depth that the single cut doesn't really have.

Other than this the album is not phenomenal, it is really worth it for three songs, the rest of it is perfectly acceptable, even quite good, but not phenomenal. But the technical competence is there and the fun is there, I think having the core of Chic supporting the band has a lot to do with that though.

Track Highlights


1. We Are Family
2. Lost In Music
3. He's The Greatest Dancer
4. Thinking Of You

Final Grade

8/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

The album which was both written and produced by Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards of the band Chic includes four classic hit singles; the anthemic title track, "He's The Greatest Dancer", "Lost In Music", and "Thinking Of You", all four of which have been sampled, remixed and reissued through the 80's, 90's and 2000's.
We Are Family is one of two albums produced by Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers in 1979, the other being Chic's second album C'est Chic including hit singles "Le Freak" and "I Want Your Love".

We Are Family:

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Compared with the likes of Prog Rock, music that is predominantly based on singles is thoroughly under-respresented on the list - as you're aware: Rock and Roll is especially badly done to as it's the basis of 75% of what follows. By disallowing compilation albums, the author had to choose live Jerry Lee Lewis and Sam Cooke albums, the Phil Spector Xmas album to represent every single girl group in the 60s and there's nothing at all by Ike and Tina Turner. So disco, although world dominating for 2 years, only produced a few single-group albums that can be called classics. He could have added the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, but I'm struggling to think of anything else.

Francisco Silva said...

Yeah, I do get your point of format limitations. Still, they have put on compilations for Brazilian musicians... possibly due to ignorance. And they do mention Saturday Night Fever in the introduction to the book, and state it was not included because they do not include Soundtracks unless all of the soundtrack is originally made for the film.