Don Ray - Garden Of Love

Album review

This one-off disco outing was recorded by Don Ray, an arranger who is best known for his work with disco maestros like Alec Costandinos and Cerrone (who produced this outing and also co-wrote many of the songs). It is a slick, ornate slab of Eurodisco that infuses its ornate orchestrations and pulsating rhythms with a layer of Kraftwerk-style programmed synthesizers. Garden Of Love is best known for the two club classics it produced: "Got To Have Loving" is a relentless dance track that alternates pounding rhythms with staccato bursts of horns and tribal drum breaks straight off a glam rock record while "Standing In The Rain" is a hypnotic midtempo track that pushes the programmed synthesizers to the forefront and effectively contrasts a horn-laden chorus with ethereal synthesizer-dominated instrumental breaks. Both songs got extensive exposure in discos at the time and remain cult favorites among disco fans today. Beyond those tracks, Garden Of Love is a mixed bag: everything is suitably slick and well-performed but the songs lack memorable melodies and hooks. For instance, "Midnight Madness" takes a chant and runs it into the ground for nearly six minutes. Other songs just feel like the loose-limbed jams with overdubbed solos from the session musicians ("Body And Soul" and the title track). The record's nadir is the finale "My Desire," an overlong torch song with a self-conscious "lounge lizard" vocal that is too campy to be taken seriously. The professionalism of Garden Of Love may satisfy Eurodisco completists but casual dance music fans will be better off picking up this album's classics on a disco compilation.

© Donald A. Guarisco /TiVo