Diana Ross - Silk Electric (1982) [2014, Remastered & Expanded Edition]

is a 1982 album released by American singer on the RCA label. It reached #27 in the USA (#5 R&B), #33 in the UK and the top 20 in Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands. The album cover was designed by . The LP contained ' Top 10, Grammy-nominated single, , which was produced and written by . All other tracks were produced by . (The song is incorrectly listed as written by instead of on the compilation album) The album was certified Gold in the USA and Silver in the UK. toured in support of the album in the US, Europe, Australia and Asia. In 1984, with a different arrangement, the song , written by & , was covered by and Whitney Houston as . must have been in a really good place emotionally in 1982; she’d just scored the biggest single of her career ( with ) and her first album as an RCA Records artist — — was a platinum-selling hit featuring two top 10 singles. More importantly, she’d executive produced the album herself and co-written one of the songs, finally allowing herself the creative control that she’d clearly been craving for quite some time. The fact that the album was a success had to be major validation for the singer, and probably inspired her to go even further in terms of artistic experimentation for her next album. And that brings us to , which is again produced by and this time features her name as co-writer on four of the ten tracks. Her second RCA album featured another top 10, Grammy-nominated hit in the song famously written and produced for by (his would be released later in the year). The second single, was one of ’s original compositions, and managed to make the lower reaches of the top 40. The album, while not as massive a seller as or , ended up going gold, thus continuing Diana’s streak of solid-selling albums. So does all this mean that is a good album? Well…that depends on your definition of good. There’s no doubt that it’s her most experimental album ever; artistically was pushing boundaries all over the place. is straight-up R&B, is hard rock, is a big pop ballad, and features an unusual reggae beat; meanwhile, is classic disco, and is a 50s doo-wop throwback. You get the picture — perhaps the only genre not touched upon here is country. By this time, had been proving for 20 years that she could sing any kind of music, so hearing her branch out isn’t necessarily surprising. Hearing it all smashed together into one album is another story, though, and listening to straight-through can be a bizarre and jarring experience. But a far greater issue than the material is the overall sound quality of the album. Much of the material here isn’t just produced…it’s over-produced. ’s voice often sounds so lost in echo that she seems to be singing from the far end of a deep, dark cave. There’d been a few cases of this less-than-clear vocal production on , but here it’s every single track, and by the time the final song winds down, you might feel like you’ve been listening to the album through a pair of very old headphones. Since was behind the wheel on this project, there’s obviously a reason she made herself sound this way. The excess echo and almost blurred sound make sense on some songs, but completely ruin others (most notably which was actually re-mixed before being released as a single), and that makes the LP a much more uneven experience than just the fact that it’s so stylistically varied.