Bee Gees

The 1975 album Main Course brilliantly recast the Bee Gees as an RnB group. The following year's Children of the World is half glittering disco set ("Boogie Child") and half dramatic ballad session ("Love So Right") that smoothes over the Gibb Brothers' more eccentric rock edges. The mega-hit "You Should Be Dancing" keeps pumping up the disco grooves until they hit an extreme level that almost forecasts the genre's cocaine-fueled implosion and a generation's subsequent burnout.

From mushy pop ballads through late-Sixties psychedelia and low-key rock, the Bee Gees
have demonstrated a chameleonlike ability to adapt to disparate pop trends. These days, as
they said on the Tonight Show in their best Cockney accents, "Rhythm & blues is what's
happening." Audacious, right? Well, not exactly. Some of their stuff is really good, better
than poseurs like Wild Cherry, AWB and Kokomo. The Bee Gees have taken pro... More >

Their closed-system commitment to a robot aura renders embarrassing questions about whether they mean what they're singing irrelevant, which is good. Too often, though, their pleasure in artifice doesn't wholly irradiate the rather patchy material. Best hook: Blue Weaver's organ part on "Subway." (Grade - B)