Gene Chandler's second LP for Brunswick suffers from comparisons to its predecessor, but consider how difficult it must have been to top an album padded with several tracks previously released as Constellation singles. The two singles here, "Those Were the Good Old Days" and "There Was a Time," are as good as anything he'd recorded for the label. Though the titles evoke similar themes, they're radically different songs. The first is (as expected) a good-time nostalgia tune with a sweet female chorus, but the second is a torrid horn-driven salute to the best dances of recent years; one looks back to the heady Chicago soul of the Impressions, while the other looks ahead to the increasingly intense urban funk of Curtis Mayfield. Chandler again displays an amazing mastery of voice control, adding brilliant tossed-off vocals between lines on the choruses…

This is an odd album, mostly owing to the widely differing sounds represented on it. Though often credited exclusively to Gene Chandler, about half of it is comprised of Chandler's work with the Dukays, the group of which he was a part until the release of "Duke of Earl" (which was a Dukays recording released as a Chandler solo single). The Dukays material is fine if relatively undistinguished late-'50s R&B harmony vocal material, mostly consisting of pleasant romantic ballads. Chandler's work, by contrast, casts him in a mode very similar to Ben E. King's immediate post-Drifters recordings (he even does "Stand by Me" here). There's a considerable chasm between the doo wop and the solo sides, and some listeners might even get dizzy after a few switches back and forth. And the album is dominated by the later tracks, circa 1965, most notably "Turn on Your Love Light," where Chandler moves into the upbeat soul sound that would carry him from the mid-'60s all the way through into the 1970s (and a professional rendezvous with Curtis Mayfield). The sound is excellent, and if you can take the switches in style and mood, this is a fun album. [The original 12-song album has been reissued on CD in Japan under the same title and with the same cover art, with audiophile sound and five bonus cuts drawn from deeper in the Vee-Jay library.]