Nightlife 揺らぎ

Nightlife is a loose concept album – more of a song cycle, really – about nightlife (naturally), a collection of moods and themes, from love to loneliness. In that sense, it's not that different from most Pet Shop Boys albums, and, musically, the album is very much of a piece with Very and Bilingual, which is to say that it relies more on craft than on innovation…

It's smooth sailing for saxophonist Paul Taylor on his sixth album of new material, a worthy successor to his fifth, Steppin' Out (2003), which hit the Top Ten of Billboard's Contemporary Jazz chart. But one could just as easily employ another aquatic cliché and say he's treading water here…

Alicia Bridges scored big in 1978 with "I Love the Nightlife (Disco 'Round)," a celebratory disco single that reached number five on the Billboard Hot 100. It was her biggest moment in music and made her self-titled debut, released on Polydor, a definite part of the feel-good disco scene of the late '70s. The blues-tinged "Diamond in the Rough" and "Broken Woman" were mildly successful, but Bridges never regained her disco reign. She released one more album for Polydor, 1979's Play It as It Lays, then settled into a series of independent recordings and compilations, such as 1984's Hocus Pocus, 2007's Say It Sister and 2008's FauxDiva XX – that explored a wider range of inspirations. "I Love the Nightlife" has been included on dozens of disco compilations, including the soundtrack for The Last Days of Disco (which also features an update from Masters at Work's Nuyorican Soul project.

Alicia Bridges is the eponymous debut album from disco singer-songwriter Alicia Bridges, released in 1978 on Polydor Records. The album featured the smash hit single, "I Love the Nightlife (Disco Round)", which, when released as a 12" single (as remixed by producer Jim Burgess), reached a peak of number 5 on the Billboard, Cash Box & Record World charts in 1978 (quickly becoming an RIAA-certified gold record for sales of over one million copies; it would now be seen as a platinum record). Alicia Bridges peaked a number 52 on the Australian chart.