Kenny Loggins: Nightwatch : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Like Boz Scaggs' Silk Degrees and Billy Joel's The Stranger, Nightwatch represents corporate/blockbuster rock at its most congenial. This doesn't mean it's a great album, but that it's an impressively homogenized aural artifact: the product of shrewd matchmaking between artist and producer. On their second record together, Kenny Loggins and jazz-pop schlockmeister Bob James have found the ideal groove for showcasing Loggins' melodic amiability: a jazzy, disco-inflected pop-rock even more elaborate and glossy than that of its prototype, Silk Degrees.

As David Paich and Joe Wissert did for Boz Scaggs on Silk Degrees, producer/arranger James has here constructed a semior-chestral LP around a stylistically restless singer who's not a virtuoso in any one area. Loggins' sharp timbres are echoed in diffuse, woodwind-ornamented settings in which he's free to move comfortably among pop, jazz and soul phrasing. The fancy arrangements turn the vocalist's excellent new band into a studio orchestra by piling on instrumental over-dubs and fading the various parts and sound effects in and out of the mix to achieve lush, deliberately mysterious textures.

James stops just short of bleeding all the colors into an unmanageable murk, and the result is a pulsing impressionism—obtrusively elegant, a little too busy and in places a bit garish. Certainly the album's high point is Kenny Loggins' streamlined duet with Stevie Nicks, "Whenever I Call You 'Friend.'" "Down 'n Dirty" features the best hard-rock singing of Loggins' career, and "Wait a Little While" shows the artist's growing facility with pop-soul. The literary value of the songs may be negligible, but that hardly matters since Nightwatch is really a state-of-the-art pop-jazz showcase, handsomely mounted.