Roberta Flack has always seemed the elder stateswoman of pop, even during her peak years in the early Seventies. Refined, literate, rooted in folk traditions, she is an artist to respect.

With Oasis, she doesn't flirt with pretension so much as she simply flirts, entering the electronic age with a disc that, cut for cut, perks. It helps that Flack hasn't lost her taste for good songwriters – there are contributions from Ashford and Simpson, Marcus Miller, Brenda Russell and Siedah Garrett. But it's Flack who holds all the threads together, singing in a way that is relaxed, giggly and sensuous.

The songs tend to blur together by the middle of side two. But then Flack records so infrequently – Oasis is only her second solo album of the Eighties – that it's near impossible to have too much of a good thing. (RS 547)

ROB HOERBURGER