Socrates

Since this is not the place, if it ever existed, to express purely and absolutely aesthetic musical judgments, it is precisely albums of this kind that give you the opportunity to say a little more, to demonstrate how music is never just a pure object that can be analyzed with cold scientific method. Let those who, blessed be they, possess the scale of immutable musical values have the presumption to order the various genres in a proper pyramidal hierarchy and to place, at the predetermined height, in their vanity, records and singles.
We, as true amateurs, take the liberty of giving four stars, (anathema!) to a group considered by many to be insignificant like KC & Sunshine Band. :-)

I agree with what Sylvian has stated, but that's nothing new... :-) : the difference is significant, even if it's not always easy to spot.

The solo piano always carries the risk of boredom when there are no superior qualities. Armstrong passes the test brilliantly, reaffirming himself as a valuable musician and versatile composer.

One doesn’t need a psychoanalyst to understand that the motivations pushing a friend to write a review about KC are largely unconscious. Memory would take him back to a carefree time, compared to the present, when the "pleasure principle" prevailed over "the reality principle," when we danced to "slow songs" at the beach, establishing "contact," to the sound of jukeboxes ("Please don't goooooo, don't gooooo, don't go away..."); when cell phones didn’t exist and we wrote letters upon letters to the girlfriend "marina"; when discos were also a place for social gathering, when… should I keep going? I know why this album came to your mind... sometimes it comes to mine too. ;-))

Well, Paddy McAloon has "strong" influences like Steely Dan, with whom he shares a certain syncretic attitude, Bacharach, the more melodic Beatles, of course; but in turn, he has become a reference point for a myriad of pop groups that emerged in the '80s and '90s, from Danny Wilson to Bible!, from Deacon Blue to the more recent New Radicals.

A couple of days ago, Edward Bunker passed away, a true writer, another great bard of Los Angeles. "Dog Eat Dog" and "No Beast So Fierce" are two novels that had an even greater impact on me than Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs." May the earth rest lightly upon him.
"When it comes to writers, memory is everything. Los Angeles, even though we didn't realize it at the time, was the closest thing to paradise ever created by man. In the '40s and '50s, it was a small, bourgeois, and exciting place; Southern California had a population of two million, and today there are 12 million just in L.A. Today it is a Third World capital: there are more Koreans there than in Korea. And it is a divided city: 20 miles west of Sunset, you encounter incredible luxury and beauty. If you travel 20 miles in the other direction, it feels like you are in Soweto." Ry Cooder would likely endorse Bunker's words.

I make a note of them because they come from Canada, which these days is the Promised Land for a certain genre, and because I trust your tips. ;-)

It's the classic album that doesn't allow you to be objective. I must have listened to "Goodbye Stranger" a good ten times in a row that summer upon its release when I was thirteen: I had fallen for a lovely Swiss girl in Maiori. :-)
I would like to say that the Manichaeism Lucio mentions in the '70s did exist, but fortunately, like other ideologies of the time, it was more theorized than practiced: many preached well but practiced poorly.
Anyway, I support my friend's arguments in defense of the song, which is far too often undervalued. The Supertramp of that era wrote some beautiful songs.
P.S. Sylvian, does the falsetto really bother you that much? Better than inhuman screams... ;-)

I'm crazy about the Elektric Band and for Corea in the '80s.

The grades...