Gloria Jones - Share My Love (Reissue, Remastered) (1973/2009)

The sonic excesses of the disco era -- those wacka-wacka guitars, those melodramatic string arrangements -- can still sound like the punch line to a musical joke in these post-disco times, when those tropes are coming back but still tend to be played for ironic effect. But this absolutely solid album, originally released in 1973 and reissued here with one bonus track, shows how much potential disco was showing in its early days, when it was just starting to emerge as a separate soul/R&B subgenre. Gloria Jones' solo debut (which followed several years she spent as a house songwriter for Motown Records) finds her working in a richly textured, explicitly soul-derived vein while at the same time making generous use of disco's emerging conventions: the lush strings on her epic "Share My Love" and the fulsomely lovely ballad "Try Love," not to mention the police-drama funk rhythms of "So Tired (Of the Way You're Treating Our Love Baby)." Elsewhere she stands hip-deep in the R&B verities, as on the exuberant, meat-and-potatoes soul plea of "Baby Don'tcha Know (I'm Bleeding for You)." And every so often she looks presciently to the future: check out the gutbucket funk and nearly punky vocals on "Tin Can People," on which she sounds like Grace Jones with an accelerated pulse. The bonus track, "If I Were Your Woman," is actually one of the strongest on the album, and is amazingly well realized for a demo. Through it all, Jones' singing is startlingly good -- her delivery is simultaneously tightly controlled and gruffly emotional. It may be dated and hipsters might play it for smirks, but taken on its own terms, Share My Love is a powerful and frequently moving album as well as a valuable document of an exciting period in American pop music history.