The Very Best of Japanese Music

While they started out in the late '60s as a psychedelic band, delved into progressive rock, and even recorded an album in collaboration with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Deep Purple achieved their greatest success as a strong, straightforward, hard rock band, anchored by the powerful guitar work of Ritchie Blackmore and the show-stopping vocals of Ian Gillan (and later David Coverdale). From 1970's Deep Purple in Rock to 1974's Stormbringer, Deep Purple were one of the most popular hard rock bands on Earth, and Deepest Purple: The Very Best of Deep Purple captures the band at the top of their form on some of their best-known songs…

Epic/Legacy's 2005 release All Over the World: The Very Best of Electric Light Orchestra is the latest installment in the seemingly endless series of ELO comps. Since it follows 2003's handy single-disc The Essential Electric Light Orchestra by merely two years, it's easy to wonder what distinguishes this from the other ELO collections on the market, and whether it was necessary to release another single-disc set so quickly after the last. The biggest differences between All Over the World and Essential is that the 2005 release has some very nice but altogether too brief liner notes from Jeff Lynne along with five more tracks than the 15-track 2003 release.

Emy Jackson (エミー・ジャクソン) was born in Essex, England as Emy Eaton. As a teenager in Yokohama she still couldn’t read Japanese well, but her ability to speak both English and Japanese fluently landed her a job as a youth DJ for the Good Hit Parade on Radio Kanto. In her notes to the excellent compilation Nippon Girls: Japanese Pop, Beat & Bossa Nova 1966-1970 Sheila Burgel writes: Her DJ career was cut short when her colleague Reiko Yukawa found Jackson singing “You Are My Sunshine” whilst strumming the guitar and sent word to A&R man Akira Izumi at Columbia Records. Akira insisted that Jackson break with the cover-pops tradition and tackle original songs written by Japanese songwriters in her native language of English.

Go: The Very Best of Moby is not the career-spanning compilation implied by its title. Instead, it's based around 1999's Play, 2002's 18, and 2005's Hotel. With the exception of Everything Is Wrong's ambient epic "God Moving Over the Face of the Waters," Anders Trentemøller's fresh mix of "Go," and a rough-sounding live version of "Feeling So Real," nothing here references Moby's output prior to Play. The one new track, "New York, New York," is a fun Giorgio Moroder-inspired throwaway featuring Debbie Harry.