High Inergy - Hold On (1980)

 Hold On is the fifth album by High Inergy. Like their previous three albums, this one was a commercial and critical disappointment. It peaked at #70 on Billboard's R&B Album charts and failed to make the Top 200 Pop Album charts. The album spawned one chart single, a cover of Bettye Swann's #1 R&B hit, "Make Me Yours", which Andrew Hamilton in his All Music Guide review described as "better-than-the-original." Unfortunately, High Inergy's version failed to achieve the chart success of the original, peaking at just #68.

 After four albums on Gordy, Berry Gordy switched High Inergy to the Motown label. This wasn't just a cosmetic change -- the Motown labels were under one umbrella but Gordy placed them with different distributors. For instance, at least two different distributors handled the various Motown labels in the Chicago area, and this was true for all locales. After hitting out-the-box with "You Can't Turn Me On," the girls from Pasadena, now trimmed from a quartet to a trio, were jonesing for a hit. So maybe a different line of distributors would curtail the steep slide into oblivion and the enormous debt they were accruing with the company. It didn't. This good album went as unnoticed as the first four and the four that followed. Like all their albums, this one had a handful of should-have-been hits, with the standouts here being a better-than-the-original remake of Betty Swann's "Make Me Yours," the disco-ish "I Just Can't Help Myself," and the grooving "It Was You Babe," written by Angelo Bond, William Weatherspoon, and High Inergy's lead singer Barbara Mitchell.