Greatest Hits (W/3 New Tracks) [Import, Best of]

Through it all, as this cohesive collection shows, the sound remains the same, layered, harmonized, smooth, crisp. Best of Boston collects 5 songs from their debut, a few more each from Don't look Back and Third Stage, and one from the underrated '94 release, Walk On. It flows like a good album should, with some songs going right into the next just as they did on the original albums. Very few things are missing except notably, Hitch a Ride, but that would have placed too much reliance on their debut. Another song from Third Stage and Walk On would've also been nice, they're underrepresented here.

The new songs are considerably more problematic. Higher Power is a great song, bringing back original vocalist Brad Delp back into the mix, but two versions of it are unneccesary. The Sholtz-sung Tell Me is very weak, meandering, and uninteresting, and The Star Spangled Banner? What? Didn't Hendrix already do this? It should've been left in the history books. Removing the SSB and the second Higher Power would've cleared way for a couple more late-period songs that deserved it.

This collection serves as a fine introduction to Boston. None of the songs are edited as they sometimes are for radio play (especially Long Time, which is one of their best songs), and it chronicles the studio wizardry of Sholtz and the soaring vocals of Brad Delp (and the others) flawlessley. For the man who has to have everything, the new tracks are little enticement, except Higher Power. Buy this, then move on to buying Third Stage and Walk on if you're a completist, because there's more than enough of the first two albums already here.

Boston - consisting of MIT mechanical engineer graduate Tom Sholz on guitar and keyboard, vocalist Brad Delp, guitarist Barry Goudreau, Fran Sheehan on bass, and drummer Sib Hashian - had exactly six hits for Epic from 1976 to 1979 - and one of those is left out of this compilation - 1977's Long Time which reached # 22 in March and, as such, was a "greater" hit than any of Peace Of Mind [# 38 in June 1977], A Man I'll Never Be [# 31 in January 1979], and Feelin' Satisfied [# 46 in May 1978].

Each of those are here, along with their first, More Than A Feeling, which peaked at # 5 in November 1976, and their best for Epic, 1978's Don't Look Back, which topped out at # 4 that October. But why leave out one of their better Epic offerings? Also, Feelin' Satisfied was their last hit as a multi-artist group as the band broke up at this point, with Goudreau later forming Orion The Hunter in 1982 [one minor hit in 1984].

In 1986 Scholz and Delp got back together as a duo with MCA and, still calling themselves Boston, had a smash # 1 with Amanda, but this really had no connection to the larger band sound of the 1970s. They also had a # 9 in early 1987 with We're Ready and a # 20 that May with the Can'tcha Say (You Believe In Me)/Still In Love medley.

In 1991 Delp and Goudreau helped form RTZ which had two minor hits and one # 20 in 1991/92, and in 1994 Scholz put together another multi-member Boston along with Fran Cosmo [ex of Orion The Hunter], vocalist Tommy Funderbunk, guitarist Gary Pihl, bassist David Sikes, and drummer Doug Huffman. Their lone hit for MCA was I Need Your Love [# 51 in August 1994].

While I can understand the exclusion of two of the duets and that last one from this album, I cannot go along with omitting one very good hit from their glory days, not to mention NOT ONE of their Epic hit single B-sides, or even My Destination which backed Amanda. The sound quality is excellent, but while the insert contains the lyrics for each selection, along with the musicians involved with each track, there are no background notes of the type I just provided here.

I really think fans appreciate having such information when looking back at artists from their past and, as mentioned above, these guys DO go back over a quarter of a century. To put that into some perspective, 28 years prior to their appearance on the scene you were looking at 1948 - and for anyone who became a fan of Boston in 1976, 1948 was ancient history.