From his disco pop album Partners in Crime came the marvellous Escape (Pina Colada Song), a great calling card tune and the last no 1 of the 1970s.
All the songs have soft FM Pop sound full of lush keyboards, disco beats and a whole lot of crooning though it lacks the energy, animation and clever structure of his hit. There is a lot of dialogue and Moog keyboards to make the rest of this soft rock stand out in a genre known for very louche and bland material. So it's refreshing the sound effects and keyboard pomp of songs like Answering Machine, Drop It or Him which add almost spoken scenarios to thick guitar, synths, answering machines, telephones etc.; but this romantic pop still doesn't live up to the hard hitting sonic quality of the Pina Colada Song, such as the abrupt stop-start rhythm, the rousing chorus and the spectacular guitar solo with it's sweet over driven tone that was recently looped for an exquisite Virgin Media advert of a mammoth breaching through a sparkly azure ocean.
I think is Get Outta Yourself is melodically the best particularly the horns singing the extraordinary title, a cool complex moment. Lunch Hour is a calypso influenced pop track with a comedic bent, but the best outside of Escape is Answering Machine as it's the closest to that song's snapshot narrative sense. Starting with some very Digitised sounding dial tone mixing with a Caribbean beat, funky scratch guitars. There is even Gino Vannelli styled ARP synths punching in on the lead up to the chorus just before the we hear the tone; Homes then launches into his 30 second declaration of love before the tone cuts him off back into the verses.
Its a great and interesting idea in the Yacht Rock genre, the keypad sound thatinfiltrates the funky rhythms is great as is the inclusion of the standard answering machine message into the body of the song. The cruel twist as he sings theAnswering machine message, his voice coming out from the crackly filter of a receiver or taped message is nice and the song doesn't outstay its welcome either at 3:29minutes. It just misses the cool stop-start beat of the album's hit single..shame.
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