Further reading on
Super Seventies RockSite!:

Single Review: "I Just
Want To Be Your Everything"

Single Review: "(Love Is)
Thicker Than Water"

Single Review:
"Shadow Dancing"

Book Review: Matthew Hild's
Andy Gibb: Arrow
Through The Heart

Andy Gibb Lyrics

Andy Gibb Videos

Like the Bee Gees' hits from Saturday Night Fever, Shadow Dancing 's three outstanding songs -- coproduced and cowritten by Andy Gibb's older brother Barry -- transcend banality through the sheer beauty of their chiffon-and-whipped cream settings. "Shadow Dancing" plays out its theme by leapfrogging melodic phrases in a gorgeous array of textures over a light funk rhythm. "(Our Love) Don't Throw It All Away" elaborates its hook into a cloud castle of strings and feathery voices laced with falsetto. "Why" builds angelic choirs on a subtle, Cuban-flavored disco beat.

The rest of the album consists of simpler pop-rock tunes, most of them written by the singer, that echo the sugary style of the pre-disco Bee Gees. In the family tradition, Andy Gibb combines solid tunefulness with elementary lyrics and a voice that throbs with a somewhat mechanized ethereality. Though his own songs mark a pleasant improvement over the mannered country-pop of last year's Flowing Rivers, they're no match for the aforementioned three magical cuts. For the success of the Bee Gees' pop-disco sound -- which has actually become a minigenre -- depends entirely upon a surface appeal in which production values, even more than melody, are the key. When it works, there's nothing like it. You have to go back to Glenn Miller ballads and Forties Frank Sinatra for pop music that conjures up a glamour this celestial.

- Stephen Holden, Rolling Stone, 8/24/78.

Bonus Review

This album was my first exposure to Andy Gibb, youngest of the performing Bee Gees clan, but something far less mysterious than intuition tells me that we'll all be hearing a lot more from him. As with his astonishingly popular brothers, everything about him seems to beckon a broad audience. Though the lyrics of his songs don't seem to say much, the music, most of which he wrote himself, rides the ear well, being a pleasant pastiche of popular motifs punctuated with tastefully applied, lilting, r-&-b-flavored rhythms. He has an engaging vocal style and a rather high voice with a light quality that permits him to bounce about the notes with apparent ease, most notably here on "Everlasting Love." There are a few moments, as in "I Go for You," when he sounds faintly like a Marvin Gaye minus the heavy sensuality, and occasionally the Bee Gees' influence is unmistakable, but overall he is not derivative or imitative of any particularly artist. For the most part, the fare here is late-adolescent romantic -- without being gratingly squeaky-clean in the Osmond vein. The vocal backgrounds (some contributed by older brother Barry, who also helped produce the disc) are blended in skillfully to enhance rhythmic flow, but the instrumentals are strictly functional and attain no distinction. This is certainly not "blue-eyed soul," to use that pejorative phrase; Andy Gibb's music is more deeply rooted in middle-of-the-road pop.

Gibb is a bit bland for my tast, but his ability to be pleasant without easing into anything that might be remotely construed as offensive, or even arousing, might be his ace in a period when no one seems to want to make too many musical waves. In this respect, he might well be the perfect popular troubadour for the relatively quiet late Seventies.

- Phyl Garland, Stereo Review, 10/78.

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