The Look of Love

With a deeper and broader track listing than most ABC compilations, Look of Love: The Very Best of ABC more or less lives up to its name. Concentrating on the band's glory days, the album covers the highlights of ABC's first five albums, including de rigeur hits like the title track, "Poison Arrow," "When Smokey Sings," "Be Near Me," and "How to Be a Millionaire," as well as album tracks like "S.O.S.," "All of My Heart," and "The Night You Murdered Love." While some of the later inclusions, such as "The Real Thing," don't quite pack the punch of ABC's prime work, the 2001 track "Peace and Tranquility" fits in with the earlier material surprisingly well. Likewise, the somewhat random track listing might be somewhat annoying to anyone trying to track ABC's chronological development, but it does spotlight how consistent their brand of suave synth pop is. With a new song, a more diverse track listing, and no unnecessary remixes, Look of Love has a slight edge over Absolutely ABC: The Best of ABC as the group's definitive retrospective.

20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection: The Best of Burt Bacharach collects a dozen mostly instrumental versions of some of the pop composer's best-known works, including "The Look of Love," "What the World Needs Now Is Love," and "I Say a Little Prayer." The lush '60s arrangements make this album a collection of retro mood music of the highest order, but anyone expecting a distillation of The Look of Love box set – i.e., a collection of the definitive vocal performances of Bacharach's songs – from this compilation will be disappointed. Still, the album delivers first-rate instrumental pop, reaffirming that Bacharach's music works equally well with or without vocals.

ABC's debut album combined the talents of the Sheffield, U.K.-based band, particularly lead singer Martin Fry, a fashion plate of a frontman with a Bryan Ferry fixation, and the inventive production style of former Buggles member Trevor Horn and his team of musicians, several of whom would go on to form the Art of Noise. Horn created dense tracks that merged synthesizer sounds, prominent beats, and swaths of strings and horns, their orchestrations courtesy of Anne Dudley, who would follow her work with the Art of Noise by becoming a prominent film composer, and who here underscored Fry's stylized romantic lyrics and dramatic, if affected, singing. The production style was dense and noisy, but frequently beautiful, and the group's emotional songs gave it a depth and coherence later Horn works, such as those of Yes ("Owner of a Lonely Heart") and Frankie Goes to Hollywood, would lack. (You can hear Horn trying out the latter band's style in "Date Stamp.") Fry and company used the sound to create moving dancefloor epics like "Many Happy Returns," which, like most of the album's tracks, deserved to be a hit single.

SoulMusic Records is very proud to present “Sacred Kind Of Love: The Columbia Recordings,” a 5-disc deluxe box set of six stellar albums, spanning nine years (1987-1996) by legendary saxophonist Grover Washington, Jr., justifiably considered an influential pioneer in fusing jazz, soul, R&B and pop and bringing his distinctive sound to mainstream audiences globally.