Here's My Love

by Donald A. Guarisco After achieving moderate success with Let Me Be Your Woman in 1979, Linda Clifford doubled her workload and cranked out another album before the year ended. This time out, she worked with an array of producers, writers, and arrangers that includes everyone from Curtis Mayfield to Philadelphia soul king Norman Harris. As a result, the finished product feels like "music by committee": polished and professional, yet dull and thoroughly devoid of personality. Songs like "King for a Night" and "Never Gonna Stop" are suitably slick enough to function as dancefloor fodder, but they are also the kind of songs that anyone could perform. The indifferent, manufactured feel of the material is further enhanced by the fact that Clifford turns in a performance that is surprisingly lacking in passion: "I Just Wanna Wanna," the album's lone single, is the key example of this problem: It is a tale of all-consuming romantic passion but Clifford gives it a mannered performance that is far too subdued and distant to make the song work. One of the few cuts that rises above the album's overwhelming blandness is "Lonely Night," a fast-paced disco epic that benefits from a full-throttle arrangement full of catchy rhythmic hooks and one of Clifford's few energetic performances on the album. "Repossessed," a vow of revenge on a careless lover, also manages to impress because it has an echo of the brassy persona that used to drive hits like "If My Friends Could See Me Now." Despite these bright spots, Here's My Love is simply too bland to appeal to anyone except the most ardent disco fanatics.