Machine Gun (1974)

Since it was used in Paul Thomas Anderson's film Boogie Nights Machine Gun has become as synonymous with the seventies as afros, flares, split screen and Starsky & Hutch. It's gone a long way to redress the balance for a band who became better known for their ballads, and even more so when lead vocalist/writer Lionel Richie went solo in the early eighties.

The first single from their debut Motown album, Machine Gun was really what the Comodores where all about. Starting out as an amalgamtion of two student bands from Tuskagee Institute, Alabama, the eventual line-up of Lionel Richie (keyboards, saxophine, vocals), Thomas McClary (guitar), William King (trumpet), Walter Orange (drums), Milan Williams (keyboards) and Ronald LaPread (bass) cut their teeth perfoming funky instrumental versions of popular R&B hits of the time. Milan, who wrote both Machine Gun the other instrumental Rapid Fire, seems as if he could be heavily influenced by Frances unlikely funkateer and leading Moog experimenter, Jean Jacques Perry - particularly E.V.A.).

Funk is where it stays for much of the album with raucous chanted vocals on songs like Young Girl Are My Weakness performed in a similar gritty funk style to Kool & The Gang, Ohio Players and the Fatback Band, if somewhat smoother. Yet it's hard to resist the solid grooves of I Feel Sanctified, The Bump and Gonna Blow Your Mind. Even The Assembly Line, written and produced by Gloria Jones (who married Marc Bolan before his untimely death in 1977) and Pamela Sawyer - major unsung contributors to the sound of seventies Motown - underpin their grander anthem with the Commodores energetic playing. Only their second song and follow-up single, The Zoo (The Human Zoo), feels somewhat out of place with it's rather 60's Supremes/ Holland, Dozier & Holland sound. Much of remainder is produced by the Commodores themselves and James Carmichael, the beginning of a collaboration that would last into the eighties.

An impressive album, the innovation of the Commodores sound, in places mixing funk with Phaldelphia/Disco influences before they'd even been properly defined, has largely been washed away by a decade of Lionel Richie's dross. It created songs that, like the title track and the last song - where Lionel declares he's your Superman - sound ahead of their time. And not a ballad in sight.