Relocating to England after a successful stint on Broadway in the early '80s (he had the title role in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat),
David Cassidy joined forces with Alan Tarney, a producer who had several soft rock hits with
Cliff Richard and
Leo Sayer at the dawn of the '80s but had recently turned into a hot property thanks to his work on
a-ha's "Take on Me."
Cassidy's resulting 1985 album
Romance naturally leans closer to
Richard than
a-ha's new wave synth pop yet the LP is slathered in synths, from its shimmering surfaces right down to its rhythms. It is, without question, a quintessentially '80s record, and it's also a quintessentially European record, relying on sprightly, tacky dance cuts, percolating midtempo pop, and an overabundance of ballads designed for televised pageant, all crossed with a heavy
George Michael influence (the man himself sang on the song "The Last Kiss," a single that went to number six in the U.K.). It's a sound that's oddly suited for this very American pop star, possibly because he's comfortable in any manner of prefabrication, so he never seems out of place within the crystalline synthetic surfaces here. There aren't a lot of knockout songs here, but there aren't many bad ones and the entirety plays like what it is: a solid forgotten mainstream pop album from the height of MTV. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine