Elton John
Victim Of Love

Warning: the subject of the following review is NOT an Elton John album.

Can a singer's name appear on the cover without them having composed a single note of the album? For a certain musical genre, this is a common practice if not entirely expected: can you imagine the Spice Girls or Britney Spears composing a song? Certainly not, not even in the wildest and most hallucinatory dreams, but when an album cover (in this case quite unwatchable) bears the name of Elton John without him having composed or played a single note, it becomes really difficult to consider such an album as an integral part of EJ's discography, but rather as one of the many extravagances typical of the character, or at most as a sort of side-project to which good old Elton has decided to lend his name and voice.

The fact is that EJ, who had just resumed his career with the excellent and underrated "A Single Man," one fine day woke up on the wrong side of the bed and decided to delve into disco music, in 1979, when the Saturday Night Fever was already well over: no member of his historical band dreamed of following him in this crazy adventure, which sees specialist Pete Bellotte as the main composer of music and lyrics, with Steve Lukather (Toto's guitarist) and Marcus Miller (bassist alongside Miles Davis and Luther Vandross) as the standout musicians. Considering the poor reputation of the album in question, its almost non-existent commercial success and the generational bias that leads me to associate "disco" and "dance" with Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Justin Timberlake, and other rubbish of this genre, I never thought an album like "Victim Of Love" could impress me positively, and instead, to my great surprise, I discovered an album not to be despised; little more than a grain compared to Elton John's real albums, but an absolute masterpiece compared to the pretty people mentioned above.

To sum up, "Victim Of Love" is an album conceived with great skill, nodding to funk and black music with its bass grooves, its soulful choirs, and its synthesizers always placed in the right spots and never intrusive, very short and smooth with its 35-minute duration, rhythmic and lively without ever being garish: the cover of "Johnny B. Goode" is worthy of open applause, faithfully retracing the melody of Chuck Berry's classic, very compatible with EJ's vocal tone, "dance-ifying" it with uncommon style and elegance, without distorting it in the least, but listening without blinders, the rest of the album in its genre also makes a great impression, especially songs like the gripping "Thunder In The Night", with synthesizers at the forefront and the light and very groovy funk of "Warm Love In A Cold World" and "Spotlight", not to mention the title track "Victim Of Love", with its bass groove and its passionate crescendo contending with "Johnny B. Goode" for the title of best song on the album.

Starting from the premise that in this album there is practically only Elton John's voice (which, by the way, contributes significantly to the success of the compositions), "Victim Of Love" has its own raison d'être and artistic dignity; it is one of those easy-listening but good quality albums that know how to give the right boost of energy, undoubtedly released way past its prime but undeserving of the label of trash album, because those are quite different, although fortunately its commercial failure made Elton John realize that it was better to keep being Elton John.