90s Ska

Your attention is invited to a collection of albums of the now legendary Putumayo World Music label.
Each album is supplied with a colorful booklet containing a lot of interesting information about the music styles within the chosen themes for an album (the names of the albums are always bright - they speak for themselves), and also about the musicians-performers.

The 2011 box set rounds up Blondie's three latter-day comeback albums: No Exit, Livid, and The Curse of Blondie. This may not be Blondie's prime, but they had a strong comeback, and this is a good, wallet-friendly way to hear it all at once…

No need to worry about Apollo 440 turning intelligent in the wake of electronica's growing experimental leanings. Their third album overall, Getting High on Your Own Supply is a ride through sampladelic breakbeat that's just as mad as 1997's Electro Glide in Blue. Seemingly oblivious that even their youngest listeners could spot their samples, Apollo 440 pillage Led Zeppelin and Status Quo (among others), blending styles from trance, ska, hip-hop, dub, and disco with a tossed-off feel that's quite charming. From the breakout single "Stop the Rock" to the unabashed, old-school silliness of "Cold Rock the Mic" and a remix of last year's "Lost in Space" theme which fuses black metal with jungle breakbeats, Getting High on Your Own Supply is another dumb but infectious party album to file alongside Fatboy Slim's You've Come a Long Way, Baby.

Those who are into irony have to appreciate the fact that Kim Wilde, England's top female pop-rocker of the 1980s, enjoyed her first major hit with the anthemic "Kids in America" – for someone who was born and raised in the U.K., she sang quite convincingly about American youth. But Wilde had a lot more than a taste for the ironic going for her in the early to mid-1980s; the singer was very much in her prime when the recordings on this CD came out in 1981 and 1982. At the time, Wilde's forte was synthesizer-minded new wave – an approach that serves her well on "Kids in America," "Water on Glass," "View from a Bridge" and other melodic yet exuberant hits found on Greatest Hits.