“Use It Up” steamed to number one on the back of its chant-friendly refrain: “one, two, three – shake your body down!”. But, effective though the surging chorus is, there’s a lot more going on here. The band are mix-and-matching a bunch of dancefloor protocols – sweet disco backing vox; whistles and latinate rhythmic tinges; chirruping and squawking synths; steelband suppleness; and finally some lovely scat-singing on the extended version’s coda. The result is pleasingly loose and relaxed, an open-door party where how you move matters a lot more than where you’re from.
If anything it’s a little too scattershot – Odyssey were at their very best on their more focused singles: the elegance of “Native New Yorker”, the determination of “Going Back To My Roots”, the frozen desperation of “Inside Out”. But just as “Xanadu” points to the waning of disco as a mainstream force, the melange of styles on “Use It Up” hints at the rich base of ideas the club scene would draw on as the spotlight moved on.
Score: 7
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