★★★★★
When you think of 70s protest soul, you think of artists such as , and , yet The O'Jays - Eddie Levert, Walter Williams and William Powell - are routinely confined to the party circuit on their Love Train. Well, Ship Ahoy should join What's Going On, There's No Place Like America Today and There's a Riot Goin' On as one of the decade's most questioning, confrontational works. Ship Ahoy is a dark work wrapped in a honeyed veneer...
- www.bbc.co.uk
2013-04-23
★★★★★
It is always refreshing - even comforting - to hear a new O'Jays album. Especially in 2004, when it is impossible to hear solid group soul on the radio and nearly as tough to find it on CD. And the O'Jays have been doing it so long and so well, I listen to any album by them predisposed to liking it -- even if it is a fairly average O'Jays disc such as Imagination...
- www.soultracks.com
2010-12-07
★★★★★
Yes, it's that time of year again. It seems like retailers have barely put the Halloween decorations and costumes on sale when they start cranking out all things Christmas, and before you know it, you've heard enough variations of the same tried-and-true holiday classics while you shop to recite them as you sleep. It's been almost 20 years since The O'Jays have released a full-length CD focusing on this time of year, and for some, Christmas with the O'Jays will be worth the listen...
- www.soultracks.com
2010-12-07
★★★★★
A defining sound of the early to mid-1970s, at its best Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff's Philadelphia International empire offered a fresh and powerful mixture of social conscience, sophisticated orchestral arrangements, the rigorous MFSB rhythm section (every bit as good as Motown's Funk Brothers) and sanctified soul singing...
- www.mojo4music.com
2009-07-21
★★★★★
Steadfast stylistically since "Back Stabbers" in 1972, Kenny Gamble's three-man mouthpiece ought to make an ideal best-of--if you dig Kenny Gamble. I regard him as a gifted pop demagogue--black capitalist masquerading as liberator. The oppressively patriarchal "Family Reunion" is the lead cut, setting the tone of a collection three of whose four sides are rendered unlistenable by Gamble's sermonizing and/or sentimentality. What's more, the O'Jays deserve him...
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-07-17
★★★★★
If the title's true--I've never considered Eddie Levert one of the great romantics--it's sure not all they're full of. Exception: Bunny Sigler's "Strokety Stroke."
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-07-17
★★★★★
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.
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-07-10
★★★★★
In which Jesse Jackson (or is it Reverend Ike) goes disco, proving that the words do too matter. The self-serving, pseudopolitical pap Kenny Gamble sets his boys to declaiming here underlines the way the overripeness of this vocal and production style can go mushy, which it does. Even the working-class party anthem "Livin' for the Weekend" is ruined by the rest of the side--some play-her-like-a-violin soft-core, and the unspeakable (would it were unsingable) "I Love Music...
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-07-10
★★★★★
Except for the astonishing "Rich Get Richer," based on a text by Ferdinand Lundberg, this is the drabbest studio album this group has made since joining Gamble-Huff. Unfortunately, "Rich Get Richer" is not the single.
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-07-10
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