Gladys Knight: All Our Love : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Gladys Knight's voice keeps getting fuller, richer, roomier, as if, even at forty-three, she still had a lot of voice to grow into. Despite this, and a continuous string of R&B hits (including a near-brilliant 1983 album, Visions), she and the Pips have been locked out of pop radio for more than a decade, seemingly frozen into their "Midnight Train to Georgia" dance steps.

But there's no more contemporary a pop record than "Love Overboard," the first single from All Our Love, and they didn't have to compromise to get it. Reggie and Vincent Calloway, who wrote and produced unlikely pop hits for LeVert and Natalie Cole last year, provide a tough, electronic foundation; Knight masterfully directs the ebb and flow of the melody, and the Pips chime in with their family-dinner-table harmonies. "Love Overboard" instantly evokes the riot of "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" and the class of "Neither One of Us" while breaking through the late-Eighties noise; it's the kind of single that's easy to get completely lost in.

For the rest of All Our Love, Knight and the Pips employ a battery of B-plus producers to ensure that they touch all the bases, and if the material occasionally falls short, the vocals never fail to be energizing. All Our Love is especially heartening at a time when so many other soul icons find their voices and careers limited by age and bad taste. Knight might be wondering about this in the title cut when she sings, "Are we something of the past/Or does the future hold a place for you and me?" But there's never really any question – Gladys Knight and the Pips are still very much present tense.