Start Of A Romance

Album review

Following in the footsteps of both Brass Construction and B.T. Express, latter-day funk band Skyy spent the better part of the 1980s honing its sound, keeping the funk-fueled ethics and infusing the beat with catchy disco. Start of a Romance, released in 1989, found the band now on Atlantic and clawing its way back into America's psyche after a three-year silence, hitting the streets with an album of light funk and dance ballads. The title track abounds with a big beat technique, while the slightly skewed tempo behind the lush vocal harmonies sets the pace for what unfolds as slick and sophisticated dance-pop. It's a technique that the band would employ to its advantage across the entire set -- while it can be argued that "Start of a Romance" is just another late-'80s dance song, there's enough push and pull within the bars to create an interesting rhythm. Elsewhere, Skyy brought the marginally soppy "Real Love," with its emphatic spoken word break, into the charts as easily as it employed the mainstream's burgeoning love of scratching within "Sending a Message." Although the album enjoyed more than moderate success, by this time the members of Skyy found themselves supplanted by the similar strains of the likes of both Janet Jackson and Paula Abdul. The band would drop from sight shortly after, not to reappear until 1992.

© Amy Hanson /TiVo