The Bee Gees - Living Eyes (1981)

With the exception of the ill-fated Sgt. Pepper movie and soundtrack album (which I dissected gleefully last week), the Bee Gees didn't make a single false move in the late seventies, when they dominated the American record charts.  (Quipped Robin Gibb, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of films.")  But with a new decade - the 1980s - the disco sound that the fraternal trio emulated was suddenly no longer in style, because everyone had gotten sick of it.  So had the Bee Gees.  They attempted to change course with their 1981 album Living Eyes.  But though that record was meant as a way of moving forward, the Bee Gees only ended up moving backward; Living Eyes re-oriented them to the pleasant but inconsequential MOR sound that typified their style of the early seventies. 

Living Eyes isn't a terrible album, but it's an undeniably weak one.  With the exception of "He's a Liar" (a minor hit single for the Brothers Gibb), which has some thunderous riffs and some nasty vocals,  the songs on this record are comfortable, soft ballads and mid-tempo light-pop tunes that are easy on the ears but difficult to get into.  Barry, Robin, and Maurice Gibb adorn songs like "Paradise," "Wildflower" and "Nothing Could Be Good" with some lovely piano passages and plaintive electric keyboards, and the rhythms are (just) enough to keep your attention and prevent the material from devolving into sonic wallpaper, but there's nothing substantial in the lyrics or the music of any song to ponder once the next song begins.  There isn't even any of the heartfelt emotion of "How Can You Mend a Broken Heart" (their first American number one single, from 1971) or 1972's "Run To Me," two examples of early-seventies Bee Gees music that have lasted.  The Bee Gees later admitted that they felt pressured by their record company boss and manager - who were one and the same man, the legendary Robert Stigwood - to get a followup to 1979's Spirits Having Flown out as quickly as possible while they were reconsidering the direction of their music.  One can respect the Bee Gees for wanting to move beyond their Saturday Night Fever personas, but reverting to their earlier sound in response to outside pressure only made them seem more anachronistic than they were already perceived to be. 

The most revealing song on Living Eyes may be "Be Who You Are," the closing cut.  A lushly orchestrated tune written by Barry Gibb, the song encourages a woman to remain the same and be true to herself as a condition to receive the narrator's love.  The Bee Gees had been dismissed by critics as a copy of the lighter side of the Beatles, and they were also accused of "piggybacking" on the disco explosion; Barry seemed to be suggesting a desire for people to hear the Bee Gees not as a copycat of anything but on their own merits.   He seems to have been unaware that millions of record buyers already had done so.  But without the benefit of an album of merit, the Bee Gees in 1981 found a pop audience that wasn't willing to listen to them very much.