today's chillout music (359)

unversal robot band / dance and shake your tambourine

Featuring more darting and swooping trails of synths than you can shake a stick at, Universal Robot Band's Dance and Shake Your Tambourine is nonetheless a surprisingly unmemorable album when compared to the other disco works bearing the stamp of Greg Carmichael and Patrick Adams. The album opens with the nine-minute "Flintstone Disco," a dancefloor-fitted version of The Flintstones' theme song, yabba-dabba-dos and all. "Space Disco" is similarly light in spirit and long in length, and uses high-pitched, multi-tracked vocals similar in fashion to the ones heard on Bumblebee Unlimited's "Love Bug" (another Carmichael/Adams product). "Dance and Shake Your Tambourine" and "You're My Music" are the two top cuts. The former, while not spectacular, has a sticky chorus and a pleasant boogie drift. The latter, penned in part by future Kleeer leader Woody Cunningham (actually, most of the players on this record would later become that group), is closer to smooth but funky soul than anything else and deserved to be a radio staple. This is not a bad record by any stretch of the imagination, but it looks that way when stacked against the group's 1982 single, "Barely Breaking Even" (though it did feature a drastically different lineup), and other flashes of timeless brilliance from Carmichael and Adams.