Consumer Guide Album

The O'Jays: Message in the Music [Philadelphia International, 1976]
The message in the message is inoffensive enough to let the message in the music come through; my favorite lines (not that I don't have unfavorites): "Heaven is just a condition/Hell is a condition too." But the music never peaks; the songs are too medium, if you know what I mean, their pleasures bound up in performance subtleties that ought to be hooked, at least once, onto something obvious. B-