Before After＜限定盤/White Vinyl＞

Daryl Hall conducted his solo career largely concurrently with his work with John Oates, stepping outside the duo whenever they reached a creative or business crossroads. The first of these happened in the back half of the 1970s, when the success of "Sara Smile" and "Rich Girl" paradoxically left Hall & Oates in a corner where they battled with their label and producer during the recording of Beauty on a Back Street. Frustrated, Hall took a busmans holiday and recorded the angular, arty Sacred Songs with King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp. Hall & Oates incorporated many of the artistic innovations of Sacred Songs on such blockbusters as Voices, Private Eyes, and H2O, albums that made the duo the biggest hitmakers of the early 1980s. When that run concluded, Hall released Three Hearts in the Happy Ending Machine, a dense, psychedelic-infused album made with David A. Stewart of Eurythmics -- an album inspired by post-New Wave trends that did give Hall a hit in "Dreamtime." Both Sacred Songs and Three Hearts are sampled heavily on Before After, a double-disc compilation covering the entirety of Daryl Halls solo career. Sequenced with a studious disregard for chronology, Before After uses the modernist pop as bracing contrasts with the smooth rock & soul that constitutes the rest of Halls career, including highlights from his acclaimed, long-running internet show Live from Daryls House. The cumulative effect can downplay the appealing weirdness of the first two records, but that amounts to a fair portrait of Halls solo work: he worked out his experiments early, then returned to R&B for 1993s Soul Alone, a fine record that set the template for Cant Stop Dreaming and Laughing Down Crying. If there are few surprises in form, the overall strength of the material can come as a shock: Hall remained a strong craftsman into the 21st century and, as versions of Eurythmics "Here Comes the Rain Again" and Todd Rundgrens "Can We Still Be Friends" prove, an expert interpreter of material. At two-and-a-half hours, Before After is a bit lengthy, but taken on a cut-by-cut basis, each song serves as a testament to one of Halls skills, whether its as a songwriter, singer, or recordmaker. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine