Their Ultimate Top Collection

Paris born guitar virtuoso Emmanuel “U-Nam” Abiteboul always had a great affinity for funk. This passion runs through his entire life's work and reaches its peak with the California Funk Machine. Volume I is a collection of selected pieces of funk history that brought it the greatest success and had a decisive impact on it.

Universal International's The Ultimate Collection lives up to its name with a sprawling three-disc (for some people, a single-disc Ace of Base compilation just doesn't cut it) overview of the alternately beloved and reviled Swedish dance-pop outfit's career. For the most part, UC covers all of the same ground as 2000's Greatest Hits, 2003's Singles of the 90s, and Arista's Platinum & Gold Collection, balancing radio behemoths like "Don't Turn Around," "The Sign," and "All That She Wants" with smaller hits such as "Wheel of Fortune" and Bananarama's "Cruel Summer." What distinguishes The Ultimate Collection from previous comps is the inclusion of some deeper album cuts and an entire disc of remixes, in case "The Sign" didn't get stuck in your head the first time around. ~ James Christopher Monger

Rick Astley was one of the more distinctive acts from the Stock, Aitken & Waterman stable of singers and groups from the late 1980s. While it was true that Kylie Minogue went on to have a consistent long lasting, almost unbroken series of hits, and artists like Bananarama, Donna Summer, and Cliff Richard were famous long before SAW got their production teeth into them, Rick Astley had seven Top Ten hits in the '80s and a brief comeback with a different image in 1991, and it was generally accepted that his voice would have made him a star, whatever the production background.

This phenomenal collection is a positive treasure trove for Dollar fans. Remastered from the original master tapes. Disc One features their debut album Shooting Stars (UK #36) in expanded form, with several rare and new-to-CD bonus tracks…

A trawl through the wonderful career of the hugely underrated Harry Nilsson takes a chronological look at his back catalogue. Pretty much every classic you would ever need is here - Everybody's Talkin', Me and My Arrow, Without Her, Without You, One… the list goes on. Naturally there is a concentration on Harry's most successful work Nilsson Schmilsson with all but one track of the entire album included. There are some delightful hidden classics too with hard to find tracks included, but perhaps too little concentration on his later career. Nevertheless, this is a superb retrospective.