The 8th Day: "I Gotta Get Home"

This album goes for big bucks online nowadays, and is not nearly as famous as its predecessor, the 8^th Day’s self-titled debut.  Its lack of notoriety is partially due to the fact that it lacked a million-seller like “She’s Not Just Another Woman,” a Detroit soul classic and the most famous cut from the group’s first album.  Yet there is something else happening with the “I Gotta Get Home” LP as well…its sound is so ominous and acid-fueled that it is unlikely it was ever intended to be a commercial success, or if it was it was a severe miscalculation on the part of someone in the promotional department at the Invictus label.  Another element that always caused problems for the 8^th Day is that they were, in many ways, a faceless studio concoction of the Holland-Dozier-Holland empire heading up Invictus records, and so there was no star power to gravitate towards, for the fans or for the company itself.  The 8^th Day included, at different times, Detroit notables such as singer Melvin Davis and guitarist Ron Bykowski from Funkadelic (who George Clinton called his “Polish white brother” in a memoir, and a “token white devil” on the inner sleeve of the “Standing On The Verge Of Getting It On” LP).  However, even regional names like the aforementioned remained tied to the “rotating door” theme underlining sessions and album releases for Invictus. 

But I digress…the above information is merely to provide context, and does little to describe the music here, which is unbelievably funky, smelly-funky, raunchy-greasy-gritty funky.  It shares some similarities with what Funkadelic was doing around the same time (1973), though it boasts more polished production, courtesy of arrangers/producers/songwriters Holland-Dozier Holland and McKinley Jackson.  Modern DJ’s have picked up on it due to the inclusion of break-filled cuts like “Rocks In My Head,” yet there is much more than breaks here, from the clavinet-driven “Anythang” to the downright sinister, tripped-out “Cheeba,” ‘70’s head music of a perfected vintage.  There are miles and miles of Detroit guitar theatrics in place, fuzzed-out and bleeding all over the mix, a recording technique sadly lost in today’s overly-clean digital sameness.  Though the 8^th Day may have been a one-hit wonder in their own surroundings, they deserved much better than that, and their full-length album works need to be more efficiently reconsidered by today’s beat-fiends, connoisseurs and critics.  Wonderful stuff, and essential to any fan of the Motor City sound in the 1970’s.