Day 176: The Pointer Sisters – Break Out

The Pointer Sisters are the first act on my phone list of bands and artists who I should at some stage get to, so I thought I’d tackle them today. I had no inspiration pointing towards anything else, except maybe a bit of a hankering for Fiona Apple, but I’m saving that for the right moment. I’m feeling a little bit too loosey-goosey today to fully enjoy that sort of stuff.

Album cover courtesy of Planet Records

The Pointer Sisters are a pop/R&B vocal group from Oakland, California, who have been active since 1969 and are still touring, albeit with a different line-up of Pointer family members than what they originally had – here I hoped that they just got a nickname for doing jaunty finger guns at people, but the name really does come from their surname being Pointer. Their father was a reverend and they started off singing in church, later branching out into the popular secular music their parents had dubbed as devil music.

Break Out was released in 1983 and it became the trio’s biggest seller. It’s not hard to see why: credit to the siblings Pointer, they have such a talent for making catchy songs that get you absolutely wired. You could probably power a small village with the amount of energy that gets generated in me when I hear “Jump (for My Love)” – if you gave me two glasses of white wine and said “I’ll give you £1000 if you get to the end of the song without moving,” I would without a doubt fail.

Ditto for “I'm So Excited,” which is so quintessentially ‘80s pop that it makes me want to crimp my hair and hop on a stepper (which I do own and actually use semi-regularly). But out of the huge hits from that album, “Automatic” is probably the best one, being just as catchy as the aforementioned floor-fillers, but just a tad subtler.

It’s an album of almost masterful ‘80s bangers in the beginning that unfortunately dips significantly at the end – the Pointer Sisters have a niche where they excel, but when they veer off of it, there’s a bit less stuff to write about. It’s almost as if they ran out of steam. Songs like “Easy Persuasion” are unfortunately just average ballads that could have been done by a fair few people, but only these gals could do “I’m So Excited”. They do manage to claw it back a little bit with “Telegraph Your Love”. I like the tech theme they have on a few of the songs, it dates them but in a fun way.

As a whole, it’s a decent 7.5/10 – nothing too special, just an overall pretty solid album with some hits and a few misses.