Arista – Arcd 8018

By 1999, Crash Test Dummies probably figured they would never be hip in America, so they made partial concessions on Give Yourself a Hand. If you have trouble getting past Brad Roberts' awkward singing and writing, then maybe innovative breakbeats and arrangements might obscure them. The results are exactly what you'd expect – an instrumentally progressive pop album, completely neutralized by embarrassing lyrics and vocals. Give Yourself a Hand redefines the Dummies sound with lightly applied techno strokes, not far off from Everything But the Girl's classic Walking Wounded.

Of Skins and Heart is the debut album by the Australian psychedelic rock band The Church, released in April 1981 by EMI Parlophone. It peaked at No. 22 in the Australian Kent Music Report Albums Chart.

Norman Jeffrey "Jeff" Healey was a blind Canadian jazz and blues-rock vocalist and guitarist who attained musical and personal popularity, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s. He hit Number 5 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart with "Angel Eyes" and reached the Top 10 in Canada with the songs "I Think I Love You Too Much" and "How Long Can a Man Be Strong".

True to its title, the 18-track The Definitive Collection gathers all of the Tony Orlando & Dawn you possibly could ever want. Starting at the very beginning of the '70s and carrying on strong for a good half-decade, the schlocky pop-meets-vaudeville trio managed three number one singles before the Top 40 rolled them out for good. All of the huge hits are here – "Candida," "Knock Three Times," "Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree," "Say, Has Anybody Seen My Sweet Gypsy Rose," "He Don't Love You Like I Love You".

The Best of the Alan Parsons Project, Vol. 2 typically picks up where its predecessor left off. With 11 tracks covering seven albums, including Gaudi, Stereotomy, and Vulture Culture, the songs here are a tad weaker than those on the first collection, since some of the albums that these songs originate from were not of this band's finest caliber. The highlights here include both "Prime Time" and "Don't Answer Me" from Ammonia Avenue, and the provocative instrumental "I Robot," the only non-vocal track on the album. All of the selections on this package convey their purpose much better within their former albums, since each song is a link in the album's conceptual chain.

It's hard not to pan the stunning averageness of Switzerland's Krokus, one of the more insignificant - yet visually amusing - European contributions to the mid-'80s hard rock landscape. Yeesh! Talk about aging badly. At their best ("Long Stick Goes Boom" and "Eat the Rich"), the group sound like a very poor man's AC/DC; at their worst, their cock-rock posturing simply defies description. OK, so the near-thrash intent of "Headhunter" does manage to evoke the infinitely superior Accept, but there's little else here to even justify the group's existence. In all fairness, there definitely were worse bands than Krokus, but you'd be hard-pressed to find them, and the material here hardly deserves a "best of" tag.

SoulMusic Records is very proud to present “Valentine Love – The Buddah/Arista Anthology,” a musically sumptuous 2-CD set by renowned musician and producer, the multi-talented Norman Connors.