Greatest Hits: Walking on Sunshine

The only real problem with One Way Records' anthology on Katrina & the Waves is that it gives too much room to their first Capitol album (which ought to be out as a free-standing CD) and not enough to their later material. Anyone seeking to go further should track down this imported disc. Thanks to EMI's acquisition of the SBK label, for which the band recorded in 1989, and its merger with Virgin Records, for which the Waves recorded in the early '90s in Germany, this collection has a little range and depth, although it's still just a greatest-hits collection -- if it were a best-of, it would also have to include some of their Attic Records sides from before their signing to Capitol. In addition to the eight songs off of the first Capitol album, there are four more off of Waves, including "Lovely Lindsey" (the one glaring gap in the One Way release). And then there's everything else -- "I Can Dream About It"; in all of its soaring glory, the soulful "That's the Way"; the group-authored catchy, frantic "Rock 'N' Roll Girl"; the smoldering "I've Got a Crush on You"; and the roaring "Rock Myself to Sleep," all from Break of Hearts (1989); and from the group's 1990s German output, "Tears of a Woman" and "I Really Taught Me to Watusi." The latter two, although not in a league with the group's best work of the prior decade, proves that they were still generating serious music. The sound is excellent and the annotation is thorough right up through 1997, which was the year of their sudden commercial resurgence. ~ Bruce Eder