MISCELLANEOUS ALBUM REVIEWS - BEST OF COMPILATIONS

• 1995: SIG - Hyvää syntymäpäivää: 18 hittiä
• 2001: Bee Gees - Their Greatest Hits: The Record
• 2004: Kylie Minogue - Ultimate Kylie
• 2005: They Might Be Giants - A User's Guide to They Might Be Giants

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SIG - HYVÄÄ SYNTYMÄPÄIVÄÄ: 18 HITTIÄ

1) Hyvää syntymäpäivää; 2) Tiina menee naimisiin; 3) Vuosisadan rakkaustarina; 4) Leijailen; 5) Elämä vie mua; 6) Ludwig Van Beethoven; 7) Jos sä rakastat minua; 8) Kolme sanaa sinulle; 9) Matti Inkinen; 10) Sadan vuoden yksinäisyys; 11) Älä sinä huoli; 12) Jos taivas on vain pienille enkeleille; 13) Viipuripop; 14) Lauantaina; 15) Kartsaa; 16) Kerro mitä on rakkaus; 17) Marianne; 18) Purppura

18-hit budget compilation from a band who had about three that have survived the age of time.

Back when car CD players were a new thing, my dad got into the habit of buying all kinds of CDs from mid-price sections and bargain buckets - often budget "best of" compilations - to play during driving. I lived in a small town so none of our shared journeys would ever take more than 3-4 songs, and in the occasional case where we'd exceed that my dad demonstrated his very liberal use of the skip button. I've thus ended up with particularly strong memories associated with a very small handful of songs from a number of all kinds of acts from the 70s and 80s.

SIG were a Finnish example of the typical path a lot of groups took around the 80s, starting out early in the decade with a more punk-oriented sound, but soon shaping into a more of a new-wave act and getting a couple of hits out of it. Those hits are the first three songs on this compilation and they're the best it has to offer. They're the kind of Big Pop Classics that will always get airplay and stay evergreen - partially because SIG were cunning enough to have them centered around particular themes that would ensure their inclusion in any themed compilations for decades to come (birthdays, weddings and head-over-heels romance perfect for Valentine's, respectively). They're corny, a bit dated and somewhat ramshackle but that's part of their charm, and they're completely fluffy but sometimes you don't need anything else but a good hook.

I have no recollection whatsoever about the rest of the compilation, and given the songs are mostly just inferior copies of the first three songs there's not much need to go beyond those initial moments either. There's also a couple of attempts at ballads (forgettable) and a few inexplicable stabs at rockabilly (godawful), further highlighting how preposterous the "18 hits" claim in the title is. SIG aren't a classic band or anything that really needs any relevance beyond their minor part of collective Finnish pop culture consciousness, and it's clear which songs are the reason this compilation is a thing in the first place. Me owning this copy (which is the very same disc my dad used to play) is solely because of faint nostalgic reasons and it's fun to know that even though our music tastes are worlds apart, we'd both go on a skip spree with this one.

Physically: About what you'd expect from a budget compilation: a generic jewel case with a barebones booklet featuring only the writing credits.

BEE GEES - THEIR GREATEST HITS: THE RECORD

CD1: 1) New York Mining Disaster 1941; 2) To Love Somebody; 3) Holiday; 4) Massachusetts; 5) World; 6) Words; 7) I Gotta Get a Message to You; 8) I Started a Joke; 9) First of May; 10) Saved by the Bell; 11) Don't Forget to Remember; 12) Lonely Days; 13) How Can You Mend a Broken Heart; 14) Run to Me; 15) Jive Talkin'; 16) Nights on Broadway; 17) Fanny (Be Tender With My Love); 18) Love So Right; 19) If I Can't Have You; 20) Love Me; 21) You Should Be Dancing
CD2: 1) Stayin' Alive; 2) How Deep Is Your Love; 3) Night Fever; 4) More than a Woman; 5) Emotion; 6) Too Much Heaven; 7) Tragedy; 8) Love You Inside Out; 9) Guilty; 10) Heartbreaker; 11) Islands in the Stream; 12) You Win Again; 13) One; 14) Secret Love; 15) For Whom the Bell Tolls; 16) Alone; 17) Immortality; 18) This Is Where I Came In; 19) Spicks and Specks

Two discs is a little excessive here but it's hard to argue against the most iconic songs here, even if it gets quite cheesy quite often

Are Bee Gees the least cool vintage pop band? During a time when ABBA and Fleetwood Mac are enjoying critical re-appreciation, 80s yacht rock is an endlessly inspiring aesthetic and the power duo of nostalgia and poptimism have given a rise in appreciation for so many easy listening radio hits from decades long gone, Bee Gees are practically forgotten and rarely receive any kind of critical love. Even their "cool" period, the folky and harmonising 60s, has resulted in a relatively few songs people ever bring up, while the 70s - the decade that inarguably defines them - brought about the still-divisive disco and falsettos. After that it's been an album after album of easy-listening radio cuts that sound like they were tailormade for feel-good nostalgia radio stations from the get-go. Stacking the hits and other miscellanea one after another in a compilation like this really just demonstrates how utterly trapped Bee Gees are in time, decade after decade, and it gives the impression that's exactly what they were going for. They were perhaps trend-chasing to a fault, utilising every single fashionable production trick to ensure they were always relevant to radio. A lot of the nostalgia-pop people have come to appreciate have an evergreen quality in the songwriting itself despite their datedness: with Bee Gees, sounding contemporary always seems to have come first.

Confession 1: I find that a schmaltzy MOR pop sound can be almost comforting, the music equivalent of a tub of ice cream you know you shouldn't be enjoying in your pyjamas but there you are, gulping it down. It's music for happily lazy Sunday mornings and summer days where everything is completely fine for once and you just enjoy that positive still in life, and it's where my appreciation for some of pop music's most dated trends stems from. So I can take the cheese and enjoy it, but it's not an automatic cruise control for success. You ultimately need a great melody to make the song and a great hook to lift it up and give it that comforting earworm quality. Whether it's disco, 80s reverb-stadium pop, 90s easy listening or even 00s smooth radio grooves, Brothers Gibb absolutely knew how to write a good hook, and that's what we are here for.

Confession 2: I find Bee Gees in the 60s to be a largely forgettable affair. It's an endless slog of faux-earnest, sappy, overly sentimental ballads, cheered up by the rare highlight that have a melodic strength akin to the later, greater material ("To Love Somebody", "I Started a Joke", "New York Mining Disaster 1941", and above all "Massachusetts"). They're still very on-trend with all the other string-laden 60s folk-pop singer/songwriters, but to a fault, sounding indistinguishable from anyone else peddling the same style at the time. The first disc of Their Greatest Hits: The Record has figurative dust all over it: there's just not enough of any real interesting material to warrant coming back to it. But then, towards the end of the disc the sudden disco reinvention rears its head, and that's when Bee Gees come alive.

"Staying Alive". "Tragedy". "How Deep Is Your Love". "More than a Woman". "Night Fever". "You Should Be Dancing". Immortal songs. Certified bangers and irreplaceable slow jams, as they say. A good number of the decade's finest hits, all in one go, in the scope of a couple of albums and showcased one after another in an immaculate tracklist string. For a long time the first third of disc 2 was the sole reason why I kept hold of this compilation. The disco period has ended up as the Bee Gees' signature sound and while still tuned onto trends, unlike the decades surrounding it in the 70s Bee Gees sounded like they're part of what defined those trends. The songwriting is sharp and dynamic, and you get a sense of a real group on an inspired, creative high rather than individuals gathering together in a studio every once in a while.

Once the disco period ends, the universally famous songs vanish and you get a quick cut-through of the next couple of decades, including a number of newly recorded versions of songs the Bee Gees originally wrote for other people, sounding fresh off the 2001 production line. Calling the selection of songs from the Bee Gees' least remembered years revelatory would be a stretch, but Gibbs still wrote consistently cracking melodies. "One", "You Win Again" and "For Whom the Bell Tolls" in particular are exactly what you'd want from comfort food schlock, and "One" in particular feels like a lost soft rock staple. I also, perhaps perversely, enjoy the new rendition of "Islands in the Stream": it's all so very early-00s in a charming way, is a genuinely powerful piece of pop schlock and the nod to "Ghetto Supastar" (which famously interpolated the original song) towards the end is actually quite a fun touch with some personality to it. Inexplicably the second disc ends with a previously unreleased sixties cut "Spicks and Specks", but not only does it work in a way as the closure of a full circle for the chronological hit trip, but it's actually better than most of the songs on the first disc.

I'm not going to state that they're gems people ignorantly look over. The only period of Bee Gees genuinely worth giving the classic moniker for is concentrated around the Saturday night fever rush, and the rest is almost supplementary. That's likely where part of Bee Gees' relative uncoolness lies: when your golden period is disco and even then you lack any further story than the ludicrous sales figures that the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack holds, you don't generate the kind of mythos around the music that gets people looking for a deeper appreciation - and I don't think there's necessarily anything deeper to look for here either, or that there's any need to. Some things you can just take at face value, and the place and purpose of Their Greatest Hits in my collection is clear: to contain some hits I love and offer a selection of inexplicably feel-good retro sounds and melodies to back them with, for those occasions when they feel like the right thing to play. While I appreciate its broadness, purely as a compilation Their Greatest Hits arguably overshoots its scope and gives a more uneven impression of the band than a tighter single-disc collection would. It inadvertently answers why Bee Gees might have become stuck in the critical limbo they find themselves in; and yet, many of their peers would be envious of the caliber of the biggest hits here.

Physically: Packaged in a standard 2-CD jewel case. A relatively thick booklet contains a number of photos across the career, a summarised (and very biased/flattering) biography and individual song credits.

KYLIE MINOGUE - ULTIMATE KYLIE

CD1: 1) Better the Devil You Know; 2) The Loco-Motion; 3) I Should Be So Lucky; 4) Step Back in Time; 5) Shocked; 6) What Do I Have to Do; 7) Wouldn’t Change a Thing; 8) Hand in Your Heart; 9) Especially for You (with Jason Donovan); 10) Got to Be Certain; 11) Je Ne Sais Pas Pourquoi; 12) Give Me Just a Little More Time; 13) Never Too Late; 14) Tears on My Pillow; 15) Celebration
CD2: 1) I Believe in You; 2) Can’t Get You Out of My Head; 3) Love at First Sight; 4) Slow; 5) On a Night Like This; 6) Spinning Around; 7) Kids (with Robbie Williams); 8) Confide in Me; 9) In Your Eyes; 10) Please Stay; 11) Red Blooded Woman; 12) Giving You Up; 13) Chocolate; 14) Come Into My World; 15) Put Yourself in My Place; 16) Did It Again; 17) Breathe; 18) Where the Wild Roses Grow (with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds)

Yes, there's a lot of cheese. But also a whole load of solid gold pop, and a lot more unexpected gems than you'd expect from a surface glance to Kylie's overlooked career.

Kylie Minogue often finds herself placed into the guilty pleasure bin even by people who openly admit to liking other popular mainstream pop. She started her musical career as the poster girl for Stock, Aitken & Waterman and became synonymous with the particular type of cheese that 80s synth pop was made out of, before transitioning to a campier glamour associated with the corniest of gay discos – neither areas which can claim to have particularly high musical esteem. The brief transitional phase between the two where she tried to prove she was a artist to be taken seriously flopped: only a few ever bought into it and even fewer remember it. She hasn’t had the critical re-evaluation that other big pop stars have had in the recent years and while she has the power to still make the occasional commercial splash, it’s mainly just her fan base that pays attention to her. While, say, Madonna has had so many iconic eras and hits over the years that people recognise decades worth of work from her, Kylie has largely been relegated to be the girl who sang “I Should Be So Lucky”. Maybe “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” if you’re lucky.

Ultimate Kylie isn’t the cash-grab seasonal stocking filler it might appear as at a glance but rather, it’s Kylie’s vindication: the proof that her discography is just as hit-filled (quality-wise even if not necessarily commercially at all times) as any other of her more seriously taken peers. The two discs stretch through her entire career up until 2004 and what becomes apparent pretty quickly is that the large scale is absolutely necessary. Not just because you’re presented with one instantly memorable and legitimately good song after another throughout the tracklist, but because the two disc format gives it a really good split. The first disc is devoted entirely to her 80s SAW era while the second disc is devoted to the 90s and beyond. The separation of the instantly dated 80s sound from the rest of the material acts in favour of both the SAW era as well as the rest of the music: you don’t get productional whiplashes and placing the 80s material on its own allows for it to be judged within its own terms.

The first disc is incredibly dated - far beyond the occasional trend giveaways of the second set - but if you can get past that (or maybe even love the sound, like myself) it’s a joy to listen: each song is so mercilessly hook-driven and shamelessly hit-seeking that you can’t help but admire. It also makes it feel a little criminal that it’s “I Should Be So Lucky” that gained such immortality when you’ve got such a towering classic as “Better the Devil You Know” awaiting: it opens the compilation and it’s such a great belter of a track with a tour de force of a chorus. Sometimes the factory-line nature of the operation surfaces a bit more obviously than other times, with a definite audible gap between the legitimately great and entertainingly cheesy songs. Particularly by the end of the disc the compilation starts to falter with the diabolically ill-advised 50s throwback “Tears on My Pillow” and a serviceable but a thoroughly pointless cover of Kool & the Gang’s “Celebration” ending the party on a dual bum note. Still, if you’ve ever had an affinity for the decade’s dated plastic cheese shine, the first disc is surprisingly good fun.

The second disc is the real heart of the collection, moving from corny fun to genuinely excellent. It swings more wildly between sounds and styles from knowingly camp to futuristic cool, but it keeps the quality coming. It even incorporates a few collaborations where Kylie is more support than the star: Nick Cave’s “Where the Wild Roses Grow” is a bewildering end to the general dancefloor joy of the entire album but is incredibly pleasing as a curveball that leaves you guessing just as you thought you got her figured out (and it is a marvellous song). The compilation also helps shed some light to her early 90s albums where she tried to escape her pop image and brings forth songs like “Breathe” and the breath-taking “Confide in Me”: the latter, in particular really deserves more kudos than it has, sounding completely unlike anything else here and bringing forth drama and tension Kylie has rarely displayed. The futuro-glitz trifecta of “Can’t Get You Out of My Head”, “Slow” and “Come Into My World” have aged marvellously and see Kylie finally finding a real voice for herself. Only the throwaway R&B bandwagon hop “Red Blooded Woman” really hits the brakes along the way, though it’s also a surprise how badly the comeback hit “Spinning Around” has dated: it revitalised her career when it dropped but several years later and surrounded by the singles that came since, it comes off as awfully pedestrian and paper thin.

It’s not just the music that’s a greatly positive surprise on Ultimate Kylie, even the compilation in itself has been pulled together so well that it’s a genuinely pleasing. You can always tell when a compilation is a quick cash-in and when it’s been crafted with actual attention, and Ultimate Kylie falls squarely in the latter department. The era split is a genius decision in itself for reasons described before and that there’s equal weight given to all eras rather than trying to pretend any of the less well received eras never happened is always a great thing (only the non-inclusion of the Manic Street Preachers aided “Some Kind of Bliss” is a little mysterious and disappointing). The liner notes in the booklet and the photography detailing the eras make it feel like you’re holding a celebration of a legacy. The attitude of giving a damn goes as far as the token new song “I Believe in You”: what could have been just a quick leftover track included solely for promotional purposes has somehow ended up becoming the best damn song in the entire two discs. It’s cool, groovy, stylish, futuristic and absolutely impeccable both in production and performance. You don’t really have to wonder why when you look at the credits and realise the song was written by Scissor Sisters’ Jake Shears and Babydaddy, who were having their own do-no-wrong golden year in 2004. The other new song, “Giving You Up”, is a little less successful but I readily admit to generally being left a little cold by most things touched by Xenomania, who produced the song.

Kudos to my sister then, who was clearly desperate for present ideas during the 2004 Christmas season and decided to gift this to me after a 30-second exchange between us about Kylie having a bunch of good songs following an advert for Ultimate Kylie on TV. I don’t think this would have found its way in my collection otherwise but I’m glad it did – there’s a lot of quality pop scattered across the two discs here.

Physically: Standard double jewel case, with a booklet very heavy on photos across the years.

THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS - A USER'S GUIDE TO THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS

1) Minimum Wage; 2) Meet James Ensor; 3) Particle Man; 4) Don't Let's Start; 5) She's an Angel; 6) Cyclops Rock; 7) Istanbul (Not Constantinople); 8) Purple Toupee; 9) James K. Polk; 10) Birdhouse in Your Soul; 11) Ana Ng; 12) The Guitar (The Lion Sleeps Tonight); 13) Bangs; 14) The Statue Got Me High; 15) New York City; 16) Doctor Worm; 17) Boss of Me; 18) Your Racist Friend; 19) Why Does the Sun Shine? (The Sun Is a Mass of Incandescent Gas); 20) They'll Need a Crane; 21) I Palindrome I; 22) Put Your Hand Inside the Puppet Head; 23) John Lee Supertaster; 24) Older; 25) We're The Replacements; 26) Dr. Evil; 27) No!; 28) Clap Your Hands; 29) Spider

An eclectic compilation for an eclectic group.

They Might Be Giants falls into the category of artists where I can understand why people love them so (they seem to be the one band that everyone in my social circles likes to some degree and who inspire a lot of adoration even among people who otherwise don't get geeky over music), but I can't necessarily relate to that myself. Compilations are my way of meeting halfway with artists like these, and for a part-time appreciator the benefit of A User's Guide to They Might Be Giants is that it really does hammer down how there's a lot more to John and John than just the affectionally nerdy twee pop ditties about obscure historical figures and events that they're arguably most associated with.

That desire for comprehensiveness is also what somewhat lets A User's Guide down, just to tackle the downsides first. They Might Be Giants wear many hats and this compilation wants to showcase them all: the ingenius pop wizards, the nerdy folk historians, the style experimenters, the soundtrack stars, the children's edutainers, the whole lot. I'm normally all for this kind of comprehensiveness, but some of these categories are stronger than others and so I just question the need for the barely-recognisable-as-TMBG "Dr. Evil" (from the Austin Powers OST - did anyone really think this was in any way essential to the film?) or four different entries from their children's music side adventures to be included here, particularly when really only "Why Does the Sun Shine?" feels substantial enough to merit inclusion. The compilation's tracklist has been organised to run according to Gaussian distribution based on the track lengths so that the shortest songs start and finish the disc, which works disturbingly well for most parts ("Minimum Wage" as a cold open kick is probably the best way to open this potpourri), but it hasn't stopped the compilers from oversaturating the end of the disc with a whole load of the collection's most inessential parts: meaning that in effect everything after "Put Your Hand Inside the Puppet Head" is complete filler and it spoils the mood. They Might Be Giants songs aren't particularly long for most part and this is one of these cases where 29 songs on a disc seems perfectly appropriate, but it's an album that still manages to outstay its welcome. It ends up rubbing in exactly why my dabblings in the band's studio albums have been less than successful, because there's always a throwaway novelty peeking its head around the corner. "Spider"? On a best of? Really?

On the plus side, the delight in A User's Guide is the recurring realisation of what a pair of sharp indie pop craftsmen lie behind They Might Be Giants. Underneath all the twee singalongs, TV features and the reputation as the ultimate nerd musical act, the fact that John & John are an incredibly talented and imaginative songwriting pair gets unfairly lost in the noise, and so the comprehensiveness of A User's Guide equally puts this in the spotlight. They're a duo who can more or less tackle anything through their sheer imagination on how to approach even the strangest ideas, and then pull it off via genuinely cunning writing. The marvellously smart and impeccably charming "Birdhouse of Your Soul" is obviously the perfect showcase for that - its cavalcade of layered vocals, sharp lyrics and heck of a load of hooks making it the most perfect and honest pop song the duo have ever pulled off and even then it sounds completely unique - but there's a lot here that matches its strengths. "Ana Ng", "Don't Let's Start" and "Put Your Hand Inside the Puppet Head" are brilliant pieces of quirky 80s art pop, which is the side of They Might Be Giants that tends to slip past the public consciousness the most, and certainly surprised me as someone who was mainly aware of their 90s catalogue and beyond. The later reinterpretations of the same ideas also work just as well, such as the delightfully unhinged "Cyclops Rock" (with a great Cerys Matthews cameo) or "I Palindrome I" which has so much more to it from a purely musical perspective than just its titular gimmick. A User's Guide keeps catching by surprise and it does it in a myriad of ways: whether because something is unexpectedly earnest, affectionate or direct ("New York City" is all three and could be a Magnetic Fields song), or you simply encounter a curveball you didn't see coming such as the cheeky interpolation of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" on "The Guitar". And of course, like any millennial who grew up with Tiny Toons, I too have a lot of love for "Particle Man" and "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" - the former a razor-sharp ditty jam-packed with wit and hooks in its 1:50 length, the latter a superbly fun cover that fits the They Might Be Giants brand so perfectly that it may as well have been theirs to begin with. Overexposed as they may be, they are genuinely great and evergreen, and a very good reason to keep hold of the compilation as-is.<

The good absolutely outweigh the bad. There are probably better compilations of They Might Be Giants' collected works out there - real fans of the duo can answer that - but for a willfully casual listener this makes for a good selection of the songs that everyone mentions and the deep cuts you’re glad to get to know better. It is also, I think, sufficient to my needs. I'm not certain what the takeaway here is when I say that owning this, I've little desire to resume with my efforts to listen to more of the actual albums and I'm satisfied with that complacency - as much as there's a lot of quite frankly excellent material here, it feels like it's enough. A User's Guide does make a strong case of why They Might Be Giants could be someone's favourite band and I'd genuinely love to adore a group with such a witty writing pen (both lyrically and musically), but the first 22 songs here will do for me for the occasional revisit to their intriguing world.

Physically: A simple jewel case and booklet affair, but that booklet is wonderful and perfectly in character to the duo: loaded with pieces of trivia, charts and graps from "a fairly complete list" of every gig since 1985, a chronological timeline of all the events/people the songs are based on, a list of liquids most featured on TMBG songs, et cetera. It's delightfully nerdy.