When this 1974 album dropped, T. Rex leader Marc Bolan was still desperate to crack the U.S. market after 1972’s huge “Bang a Gong (Get It On).” So he teamed with his backup-singer girlfriend (and brief Motown recording artist) Gloria Jones, injected some American soul and funk into his hip-sway rock, and all but bid adieu to his massive fame in the U.K. The result did even less to tempt Yankee favor. But it wasn’t all for naught. Sure, the “20th Century Boy” T. Rex was now lost in space (dig “Interstellar Soul”) and going by the name of Zinc, but this soul-rock hybrid predated Bowie’s Young Americans disco-glam by more than a year. (Though “Teenage Dream” updates Bowie’s previous “Moonage Daydream,” and The Hidden Riders of Tomorrow cop their allegory from The Spiders from Mars.) But Zinc Alloy showed there was real soul in Bolan’s velvet trou, and some Dylan too: “Venus Loon” catches his inner Zimmy rocking an afternoon delight, and surely Dylan would have been proud of the cockeyed Rimbaudisms in “Explosive Mouth.”