Day 376: Don Ray – Garden of Love
If you can believe it, we have once again made it to the best day of the week: it’s Disco Friday. Due to aforementioned reasons it’s a very mellow Disco Friday, but I’m not letting that stop me, I’m having my traditional Friday night disco shower. I’m technically listening to even more Cerrone today and could do with a bit more variety to my disco features, but give me a break, I love the guy.
Album cover courtesy of Malligator
Today’s album is by legendary disco producer and arranger Don Ray, or Ramond Donnez, who’d worked extensively with Cerrone on his music and played keyboards on his albums. He was also a member of Cerrone’s elusive group Kongas, which I rated very highly when I listened to them. In 1978, he and Cerrone decided to co-write and co-produce a solo album for Don Ray, and it reached number 4 on the US disco charts and birthed two club classics, "Got To Have Loving" and "Standing In The Rain".
The resulting album is a cult classic for disco fans with some groovy dance floor stompers and a few cheesy lusty classic euro-disco tracks, all of which are a pleasure to listen to. As you can probably assume, the production is lush and vibrant, and occasionally you can hear whispers of Kongas from the tracks. And if there’s one thing this album does, it keeps up the quality from beginning to end, there’s no song I didn’t enjoy.
This album is a shining example of why I love disco so much: it’s free serotonin. If you put this on and have a little dance to it you’re just bound to forget your troubles for at least half an hour, but I’d argue it has a slightly more lasting effect. It’s an album so good that it makes you think “man, maybe I should learn how to DJ,” but maybe there’s enough of them already without me. Nevertheless, there’s nothing better than an album that makes you feel inspired, and for disco fans, this is definitely that.
Shame he only did this as a one-off, I wish there was lots more where this came from. It’s somewhere between a 9 and 8.5, but I’m just going to call it an exceptionally strong 8.5/10. It’s going straight into the repertoire of albums to put on when I want to have a good day.