Midnight creeps so slowly into hearts of men

Continuing my trip back through the 1979 album charts.

12/08/79 : I Am - Earth Wind And Fire

Our first visit with Earth Wind And Fire - they're a group I don't really know much about. I'm expecting a very US-centric, 70s sound without really being able to describe what I mean by that...

Yeah, it's kinda funky-disco-soul - "Boogie Wonderland" is probably the track people know best and it's a fair example of the sort of thing we've got here, but I was surprised to also recognise "After The Love Is Gone" because I didn't know it was by them. I won't be rushing to listen to this again, but it was considerably more enjoyable, skilful and undated than I was expecting. It's quite the hippy album cover though, isn't it? 

We're at #5 in the charts this week on their ninth week of a 21 week run, with this being as high as it got and the rest of the top five this week were TBDAITW, ELO, Supertramp and ABBA (shame on Supertramp for including lowercase letters) and the highest new entry was AC/DC (#8) who pleasingly have no lowercase latters!

Wikipedia tells us this is their NINTH album with their debut having come out in '71 and they're officially still going, but their last album came out in '14 - it looks likely we'll have three or four more visits with them over the years. Critically it was very well received indeed, although there were some comments that it wasn't quite as good as some of their previous heights and commercially it did well in some strange places, getting to #10 in Japan, #3 in Sweden and the US and #2 in Norway.

discogs.com tells us you can pick up a decent enough copy for a couple of quid, but if you want to spend the strange amount of £57.41 then you can pick up a Japanese promo pressing, complete with obi. Like Supertramp from the previous week, this was one I came to pretty ignorant about and have left feeling impressed by the level of skill and enjoyment I experienced.

05/08/79 - An interesting first listen
19/08/79 - Pretty impressive

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