Best Of Lakeside

After leaving ABC in 1978, funky soul kings Lakeside moved on over to the Los Angeles imprint Solar, where they cut a slew of hits beginning in 1979 with "Shot of Love," "One Minute After Midnight," and later the classic "Rough Rider," "Fantastic Voyage," and the killer "Everready Man." The band even scored with a completely reinvented reading of the Beatles' "I Want to Hold Your Hand." (If you didn't look at the songwriting credits and weren't familiar with the lyrics, you'd swear it was a Motown song.) The U.K.'s Sequel imprint licensed 15 tracks cut between 1979 and 1987 to offer a solid portrait of late-era Lakeside that holds up beautifully in the 21st century. A lot of these tracks were overlooked given the other music going down at the time, and some of these sides that were hits have been left to the dustbin of history, but not memory. Whether you snag this one or the mirror image of the same thing put out by Castle, you can't go wrong. ~ Thom Jurek|