Mass Production

When Mass Production made its vinyl debut with 1976's Welcome to Our World, the band found itself being compared to Brass Construction, BT Express, and the Crown Heights Affair -- and the fact that Mass Production rhymes with Brass Construction certainly wasn't lost on listeners. Like those other bands, Mass Production favored a horn-powered style of funk-disco that club DJs found to be extremely useful. Creatively, Production hit the ground running with this LP, which wasn't a huge radio hit but enjoyed a great deal of exposure in danceclubs. And it isn't hard to see why the Richmond outfit was a club favorite in the late 1970s; hypnotic tracks like "Wine-Flow Disco," "I Like to Dance," and "Fun in the Sun" are endlessly danceable. "Magic," in fact, predicts the house music that came out of Chicago in the 1980s. Not everything on this album is up-tempo; "Just a Song" and "Galaxy" (which has a cosmic spirituality along the lines of Earth, Wind & Fire or Lonnie Liston Smith) point to the fact that Production also gave us some memorable ballads. Most of the time, however, Welcome to Our World takes dead aim at the dancefloor. Some of Production's subsequent albums were uneven and inconsistent, but its recording career was off to a promising start with this impressive LP. ~ Alex Henderson, All Music Guide