The Marcels - The Best Of The Marcels (1990)

Lest anyone think the Marcels were a one-song phenomenon (i.e. "Blue Moon"), this CD will be a valuable learning experience, as well as delightful listening. Drawing primarily from their singles (with three LP cuts and an unissued outtake filling out the song lineup), this is a fairly dazzling array of vocal acrobatics, much of it hung around old pop standards, among them "Summertime," "That Old Black Magic," "My Melancholy Baby," and "Over the Rainbow," as well as songs of more recent vintage. Among the discoveries to be made here is a gloriously radiant recording of an otherwise "lost" Barry Mann/Cynthia Weill number called "Find Another Fool." Cornelius Harp's lead on "Summertime" is a glorious thing to hear, while the brilliantly arranged "Heartaches" -- dominated by Walt Maddox's baritone -- which managed to hit number nine nationally, manages to encompass something essentially poignant about R&B and rock & roll, and elicit a laugh or two (or three) in the process. Original producer Stu Phillips, whose subsequent career involved him in everything from the Monkees to the soundtrack of Battlestar Galactica, did a brilliant job on these tracks, which hold up very well today, the voices always out front and in your face, and just enough rhythm section and whatever lead instrument (usually a sax) to sweeten the mix and add a little punch behind the group. If this disc has any flaw, it's that the makers didn't follow the chronological order of the recording dates, which means that the sounds of the two distinctly different lineups of the group are intermingled -- but the notes also include a chart delineating precisely which lineup sang on which songs, and that's excellent compensation. The sound holds up extremely well for a CD mastered in 1990, and the only reason for not picking this up would be to grab Sequel records' Complete Colpix Sessions instead, which features 38 songs from the same source as these 18.