Level 42 Running In The Family

Polydor's Level Best is a thorough, successful overview of the smooth, jazzy British sophisti-pop outfit, containing all of their biggest hits and best material, including the sublime "Something About You." At 18 tracks, it may run a little long, but it still is as comprehensive a summary of Level 42's career as could be hoped.

At the beginning of their career, Level 42 was squarely a jazz-funk fusion band, contemporaries of fellow Brit funk groups like Atmosfear, Light of the World, Incognito, and Beggar & Co. By the end of the '80s, however, the band – whose music was instantly recognizable from Mark King's thumb-slap bass technique and associate member Wally Badarou's synthesizer flourishes – had crossed over to the point where they were often classified as sophisti-pop and dance-rock, equally likely to be placed in the context of Sade and the Style Council as was any group that made polished, upbeat, danceable pop/rock. The band's commercial peak came with 1985's World Machine, but they continued to record and tour sporadically throughout the '90s and 2000s.

After several hit albums in the U.K., Level 42 finally found American success with the 1986 album World Machine and its hit single, "Something About You." When 1987's follow-up release Running in the Family also scored on this side of the Atlantic, it seemed Level 42 was here to stay. But 1988's Staring at the Sun was an artistic catastrophe and a commercial failure, and Level 42 would never again reach the artistic and commercial peak of its two U.S. successes. Guaranteed was a considerably better album than Staring at the Sun – not that the band could do much worse – but it went virtually unnoticed in America.

Level 42 was steadily perfecting and evolving their dance/pop, funk, and rock mix during the '80s, and when they hit the big time, the label began reissuing their earlier, less successful material. It's hard to understand why this didn't do as well as later albums like World Machine, Running in the Family, and Staring at the Sun, although the obvious reason would be that no singles ever broke that compared with the ones from those releases. But it was just as well produced, the songs were almost as cutely performed, and the arrangements are very similar.