Skin Tight suffers from too little substance, though its skeleton is streamlined, expertly wrought funkiness. On a majority of the six extended cuts, the Ohio Players build some tantalizing riffs around skimpy vocal and lyric performances.

The fast numbers are buoyed up admirably by the group's horn section, which avoids the murky Blood, Sweat & Tears quality of some of its earlier work. The guitars and keyboards are beefy but understated (and beautifully mixed) and the instrumental juxtaposition is often pleasantly surprising. But the half-street rap, half-Sly-like bravado on. "Skin Tight" and "Jive Turkey" doesn't stand up within the length of those cuts. And the rap — while in small doses an apt shorthand for the inviting insouciance of the album — is banal, even for music that serves primarily for partying or dancing.

Despite the thinness of much of this record, though, the Ohio Players do threaten to become a major force in black rock. As the most commercial example of the innovative, insolent offspring of the Family Stone (along with the Funkadelic and Betty Davis), the group may be indispensable in popularly tempering the middle-of-the-road bent of current black music. Hints of what these men—who play their own instruments, write and arrange their own songs — can do are heard in "Is Anybody Gonna Be Saved?," which is constructed on a gospel framework with technical savvy and spiritual respect. The tune is undercut with philosophical despair and an angry questioning, the latter less alienating than that of Sly Stone. "Heaven Must Be Like This" draws even more successfully upon the Players' capabilities. It's an expansive, passionate ballad, radicalized with a judicious, lush use of the synthesizer, a bold harmonic blend and an outrageous. humorous · sensibility. These elements bend but don't shatter the tune's sound structure. (RS 166)

MARK VINING