Though a cursory listen to
Take Me in Your Arms may lead you to presume so,
Fantasy isn't just another fly-by-night club/dance act. There's actually quite a bit of history behind
Fantasy, enough to help make this substantially uninteresting album somewhat interesting. The group actually originated back in the late disco era, 1981. A successful, yet now largely forgotten, late-'70s disco producer,
Tony Valor, had borne
Fantasy that year, one of the last of the many projects he'd masterminded.
Fantasy ended up being one of his most successful projects, boasting a very popular, high-charting single, "You're Too Late," before quickly descending into bargain-bin obscurity thereafter. Twenty-two years later, in 2003,
Valor revived
Fantasy, albeit in name only, and released an eponymous album on his own TVI label. This new
Fantasy featured several young ladies as vocalists and musically sounded not too removed from the Hi-NRG dance music popular mainly in the gay clubs of New York and Miami. The comeback was quite successful given the circumstances and boasted a minor chart hit, "Again." So
Valor returned to the studio and cut another
Fantasy album,
Take Me in Your Arms. This one is similarly rooted in Hi-NRG and again features a stable of attractive and attractive-sounding young ladies: Dee, Janette, Mia, and Misty. Like much Hi-NRG-style dance music, the songs on this album are fairly interchangeable -- comprised of high-energy tempos, sweeping synth washes, and simplistic singalongs that celebrate love, affection, and other such intimacies. And also like much Hi-NRG-style dance music, that of
Take Me in Your Arms is singles-driven -- almost half the album consists of various versions of the two singles: the previously released "Again" and the new single, "Hot Shot." As aforementioned right at the start, this is a substantially uninteresting album. Even if you're a Hi-NRG fanatic, all you really need are the singles, and even they don't merit too many listens, as they sound disappointingly limp outside of an arousing club setting. Regardless,
Take Me in Your Arms is fairly curious from a historical standpoint, if not intrinsically substantial, let alone worthwhile.