Barbra Streisand: Guilty : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Barbra Streisand's collaboration with Barry Gibb marks an astonishing climax to the second phase of her eighteen-year recording career. This phase, which began almost a decade ago with Stoney End, has had its ups (Streisand Superman) and downs (Butterfly) as the singer tried to adapt her stentorian, pseudoperatic style to a variety of rock and soul trends. Yet despite having loosened up enough to be called "contemporary" (which she certainly wasn't in the late Sixties), Streisand is still essentially a theatrical diva.

One reason that the Streisand-Gibb team proves to be the most sensational artist-producer duo since Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones created Off the Wall is that both principals are basically traditional pop sentimentalists who complement each other in convenient ways. Barbra Streisand's steel-belted soprano gives more dramatic authority to Barry Gibb's chromatic miniarias than practically any other voice could. And because Gibb's compositions are bel canto baubles whose lyrics consist mainly of comic blather concerning love, Streisand is spared worrying about what the songs mean. Indeed, Gibb's sweet nothings are so slight that they allow Streisand to be a love goddess without ever having to think about playing for keeps. Though she was once a great interpretive singer, Barbra Streisand now possesses a larger-than-life image that completely overwhelms her material. These days, whatever she sings becomes an extension of her superstardom: an expression of the triumph of her will rather than a text to be revealed.

Since they're such perfect abstractions of the concept of glamour, Barry Gibb's songs may be the ultimate star vehicles – they're pure diaphanous atmosphere. The Rolls Royce-like quality of Gibb's production provides equally ideal transportation, because it shifts straight into fantasy while absolutely ignoring the gears of real life. In Streisand's case, this treatment puts a classy shine on the toughness of her Brooklyn-cum-Malibu chutzpah. As a background vocalist and co-lead singer on two cuts, Gibb is a better partner than either Neil Diamond or Donna Summer, since he never competes with Streisand. Instead, he's like a smart chauffeur, whisking his princess heavenward.

Guilty's sound is an improved, enriched variation of the soul-inflected, Caribbean pop style that Barry Gibb polished on younger brother Andy's After Dark and the Bee Gees' Spirits Having Flown, with little of the latter's funky trim. Here, he's slowed the tempos and thickened the textures to set off yet soften Streisand's wail. But if Guilty is one of the plushest pop albums ever made, it's one of the airiest, too. The arrangements are seldom overbearing, which is quite a feat considering the enormousness of the voice they're surrounding.

More important, Gibb has handed Barbra Streisand some of the prettiest compositions he's written. Song for song, Guilty is stronger than any of the Bee Gees' or Andy Gibb's LPs. The title track fuses a Doobie Brothers-type rhythmic hook onto a tune that somehow seems Russian with a tropical lilt. "Woman in Love" expands a melody very similar to Andy Gibb's "After Dark" into an aural balloon that wafts Streisand's singing right through the stratosphere. And the Puccini-esque sweetness of "Run Wild" and "What Kind of Fool" easily matches that of their prototype. "How Deep Is Your Love."

Though Barry Gibb recycles the same hooks with only minor changes, he keeps improving the settings: e.g., the new record's background falsettos are much subtler than the shrieks on Spirits Having Flown. Now the rhythms deftly touch several grooves, from festive skiffle ("Promises") to feathery funk ("Never Give Up"). Guilty's closest flirtation with rock is Gibb and Albhy Galuten's "Make It like a Memory," a seven-minute Broadway blues with a snappy guitar solo by Pete Carr.

While Guilty is a romantic entertainment with no ambitions beyond making billions of hearts flutter and earning millions of dollars, it's also as beautifully crafted a piece of ear candy as I've heard in years. Barbra Streisand and Barry Gibb's album may not be particularly nutritious, but it sure is tasty.