The 1980 Listening Post - Daryl Hall & John Oates - Voices

Daryl Hall & John Oates - Voices

#472

by Scott Von Doviak

July 29 1980

Day Hall & John Oates

Voices

Genre: Pop/Blue-Eyed Soul with a dash of New Wave

Allen’s Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Scott’s Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Allen’s Highlights:

How Does It Feel to Be Back?

United State

Kiss Is On My List

You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feelin’ 

You Make My Dreams

Scott’s Highlights:

You Make My Dreams (Come True)

Kiss on My List

United State

Diddy Doo Wop (I Hear the Voices)

Here we have one of the first “rock” albums I bought with my own money, circa eighth grade. (I think the first was Kiss Destroyer, but I was more into comedy albums back then.) Relistening to it for this review was one of those weird déjà vu experiences you only get with music you listened to over and over until you stopped for…decades. I haven’t heard some of these songs for more than 35 years, but they came back to me quickly. This is clean, crisp, well-constructed pop music, state of the art for the era, and a lot of it holds up even if it’s not much to my taste these days. Of course there are the hits that still haunt supermarkets to this day, “Kiss on My List” and “You Make My Dreams (Come True),” which remains a perfect, irresistible pop tune. There’s the requisite cover, “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” which is well-sung but pretty rote, as well as being a song I never loved in the first place. There’s also a “covered,” a song made more popular by someone else, “Everytime You Go Away,” which became an obnoxiously unavoidable MTV hit for Paul Young a few years later. 

Weirdly, Voices isn’t front-loaded with the hits as was the style at the time. Granted, the opener “How Does It Feel to Be Back” was the first single and they probably had high hopes for it, but it barely cracked the charts. It’s pleasant enough, with Beatlesque harmonies and a Warren Zevon-ish guitar part. “Big Kids” is a stab at New Wave with a fun chorus, “United State” is as punky as they get, which isn’t very, but I could hear it on a Blondie album and I can’t think of another song that includes the word expatriate. “Hard to Be in Love with You” is catchy enough, “Gotta Lotta Nerve (Perfect Perfect)” is doo-wop/New Wave fusion, “Africa” is not the Toto song, and if I listened closer to the lyrics it’s probably quite problematic, but it’s got a nice dose of sleazy sax. Album closer “Diddy Doo Wop (I Hear the Voices)” is about as weird as H&O get – the inner monologue of a Son of Sam type on the loose in bad old New York. I’m glad I got an excuse to revisit this one, because I doubt I ever would have done it on my own.

https://open.spotify.com/album/4LniALl9S6YedTFdiZWOMS?si=JA-eUAdxTx-94VXJOXUE-Q