Best 2000 2010

That's the Way I Like It: The Best of Dead or Alive collects 18 tracks from the androgynous British dance-pop outfit responsible for one of the '80’s most enduring club hits, “You Spin Me Round (Like A Record)”. Other highlights include a cover of KC & the Sunshine Band's disco classic "That's the Way (I Like It)," “Lover Come Back to Me," "In Too Deep," "My Heart Goes Bang,” and 1986's "Brand New Lover,” as well as the four extended/alternate mixes that populate the collections’ second half. Remastered from the original studio tapes, the anthology may not be exhaustive, but it’s solid enough for casual fans, and engaging enough to recommend to listeners with the false notion that Dead or Alive was a mere one-hit wonder.

The first disk surveys film music from the thirties and forties; jazz was no longer "jungle music" (i.e., ludicrously termed as "non-white" music), but still "youth-oriented," as the liner notes assert. Off the bat, the best track is most certainly the eighth, Artie Shaw's all-too-brief Nightmare (from MGM's Dancing Co-Ed).

As a 16-song, single-disc best-of, this does the job very nicely for those who want Nyro's best and most famous songs in one place. Only nine tracks into the CD you've already heard "Sweet Blindness," "Wedding Bell Blues," "And When I Die," "Blowin' Away," "Eli's Comin'," "Stoney End," and "Stoned Soul Picnic," which should be enough to convince anyone that Nyro was a major singer/songwriter…

As a 16-song, single-disc best-of, this does the job very nicely for those who want Nyro's best and most famous songs in one place. Only nine tracks into the CD you've already heard "Sweet Blindness," "Wedding Bell Blues," "And When I Die," "Blowin' Away," "Eli's Comin'," "Stoney End," and "Stoned Soul Picnic," which should be enough to convince anyone that Nyro was a major singer/songwriter. An argument could be made that, as an album-oriented performer whose career spanned about three decades, this is too brief a sampling of her discography, and too lopsided, as just one of the songs was recorded after 1970 (at which point she had yet to reach her 25th birthday). Still, the hard facts are that Nyro's best recordings and compositions were those from the beginning of her career.

Born Caroline Catharina Müller in the Netherlands, she moved with her family to Germany in the late '70s. In 1980, she became a member of the girl quartet Optimal, who issued two singles. During one of the band's concerts in Hamburg, she was approached by songwriter/producer Dieter Bohlen who had just taken the continental charts by storm with his duo Modern Talking…

Ex-boxer Screamin' Jay Hawkins' live show, full of on-stage coffins, skulls, and toilets, prefigured the extravagant concert productions of later artists like Alice Cooper and George Clinton, and Hawkins' full awareness of the visual aspect of rock music extended even to his lyrics, which were purposefully graphic and surreal. In essence, Hawkins was a one- or two-trick pony, but boy, those ponies could run. His masterpiece was "I Put a Spell on You," which he originally recorded for OKeh Records (supposedly while extremely drunk) in 1956, and while Hawkins' version was never even close to being a commercial hit, the song has been covered so many times (most notably by Nina Simone) that it has deservedly been certified as a rock and R&B classic.