The Best Of Cutting Crew [CCCD]

"Who would have thought a boy like me could come to this?" This collection is worth owning merely for the immaculate single "(I Just) Died in Your Arms Tonight," a much-maligned saccharine heart-burst that, along with primo Honeymoon Suite and Glass Tiger, gracefully straddles the line between pop-metal and pop light. The unapologetically mellow "I've Been in Love Before" updates "I'm Not in Love" for the strip-mall crawlers, and comes remarkably close to the same level of commercial perfection. Also from the Broadcast debut comes "Any Colour," a hidden gem of '80s brilliance (an oxymoron?) that wraps crisp, big-bang production around breakneck guitar breaks mixed with hoots, yelps, yearning, and crooning; this love dream recalls the Producers' waver classic "She Shelia" while surreptitiously slipping in an odd Pink Floyd nod. "One for the Mockingbird" and "Life in a Dangerous Time" also deserve mention, and again appear on Broadcast. So since that LP is so blasted rock solid, why not just put the whole blamed record on a disc with the Cutting Crew's second, Scattering (the band's third, Compus Mentus, seems lost forever)? Well, then legions of fans would be deprived of the extended version of "(I Just) Died in Your Arms Tonight" (seven seconds longer). The simple-minded "Scattering" jigs in a Big Country way and "Fear of Falling" gains its balance once over the Automatic rip opener, but the three aforementioned masterworks set a standard impossible to maintain. ~ Doug Stone