Consumer Guide Album

Dusty Springfield: Cameo [ABC, 1973]
Offensive as I find the notion of a "girl singer" in this year of our enlightenment, something about this thirty-four-year-old woman demands the term, because her genius is to make me believe, down beneath my rational self, that she needs me. Simultaneously gushy and ladylike, she sings like the beautiful maidservant of men's vainest and most shameful fantasies--always the supplicant, always in love. Yet at the same time she manages to elicit sisterly sympathy from other women. Lambert and Potter have mixed the orchestra way too high on this record, but for these guys, who usually write banal melodies that stick so stubbornly you hate them for it, the tunes are complex and likable. Maybe that's because L&P adjusted them for a tough human being who convinced them mid-session that she wasn't just some backup chick doing a solo spot. Recommended: "Of All the Things," "The Other Side of Life." B