The Who Shm

“This album is almost all new songs written last year, with just two exceptions,” Townshend said in a statement. “There is no theme, no concept, no story, just a set of songs that I (and my brother Simon) wrote to give Roger Daltrey some inspiration, challenges and scope for his newly revived singing voice.”

The Who's mighty catalog of beautiful, poignant, and often silly pop songs bashed out with Cassius Clay finesse has suffered in the past at the hands of multiple, butcher-shop best-ofs and horrible packaging. But this thrilling band–undeniably one of ye classicke rocke's greatest–gets the career-spanning entry-point compilation it deserves with the double-disc Ultimate Collection. The songs included here are no-brainers, for the most part–if they aren't huge hits like "My Generation," "I Can See for Miles," or "Baba O'Riley," they're long-standing fan favorites such as "Boris the Spider," "Pure and Easy," and "Squeeze Box." And while this reviewer wishes different songs were chosen from Tommy, and more than one tune was gathered from their arguably finest (and definitely silliest) album, The Who Sell Out, this record really isn't for fans (aside from the total trainspotter types) but for newcomers.

Much of Who's Next derives from Lifehouse, an ambitious sci-fi rock opera Pete Townshend abandoned after suffering a nervous breakdown, caused in part from working on the sequel to Tommy. There's no discernable theme behind these songs, yet this album is stronger than Tommy, falling just behind Who Sell Out as the finest record the Who ever cut. Townshend developed an infatuation with synthesizers during the recording of the album, and they're all over this album, adding texture where needed and amplifying the force, which is already at a fever pitch…

Pete Townshend revisited the rock opera concept with another double-album opus, this time built around the story of a young mod's struggle to come of age in the mid-'60s. If anything, this was a more ambitious project than Tommy, given added weight by the fact that the Who weren't devising some fantasy but were re-examining the roots of their own birth in mod culture…

The full-blown rock opera about a deaf, dumb, and blind boy that launched the band to international superstardom, written almost entirely by Pete Townshend. Hailed as a breakthrough upon its release, its critical standing has diminished somewhat in the ensuing decades because of the occasional pretensions of the concept and because of the insubstantial nature of some of the songs that functioned as little more than devices to advance the rather sketchy plot…