Sylvia Striplin
Give Me Your Love

This album represents the sunniest side of 1981. Let's start with the cover: a close-up of the singer, with an innocent, languid, and sensual gaze, extremely feminine, demands love for herself. Inside, eight songs, soul funk disco genre that indeed talk about love, which, whether reciprocated or not, always has hopes. Sylvia Striplin - Give Me Your Love.

The album possesses the same atmospheres as The Dude by Quincy Jones and Give Me The Night by George Benson: American streets, both by day and night, the intimacy of dressing rooms, the stages, the rich voices of backup singers of color. Here, however, the singer does it all by herself: the choruses, though the same, vary each time thanks to the invention of vocalization.

The record is so homogeneous due to the skillful alternation between lively moments and soft moments, and this means that the songs resemble each other, but those that stand out certainly do. Their length is never below four minutes, and therefore their theme is amply developed without boring the listener. On the contrary, it is always a new pleasure. This is especially true for "Give Me Your Love," "You Can't Turn Me Away," "Toy Box," and "All Alone," the most prestigious tracks. Then we have the cover "Searching" by Roy Ayers who is also the album's producer. "Look Towards The Sky" and "You Said" are memorable, while "Will We Ever Pass This Way Again" is the least prominent song overall.

Ultimately, for me, it was a wonderful discovery and the only one concerning Sylvia Striplin, given that after this first work, there are no other publications.