Now! 79 – album review
[Rating:3/5]
This review was submitted by Philip Lickley, who runs the music blog .Wav Goodbye.
As we hit the summer holidays it’s time for the latest and – would you believe it – 79th Now! compilation release, bringing with it another forty-four songs.
The challenge of all Now! albums is to both document the big songs of the past four months but also trying to include some of the bleeding edge songs so it doesn’t date quicker than a Big Brother star after eviction.
With a few exceptions, disc one is by far the strongest of the two discs. We have a lot of the big recent tunes from Lady GaGa (“Born This Way”), Take That (“Love Love”) and Katy Perry (“Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)”) plus some very cutting edge inclusions of the new Scouting for Girls single and The Wanted with “Glad You Came” which, at the time of writing is still at number one in the charts. In fact, in the week of its release, Now! 79 had 15 of the top 20 on it. Impressive.
There are a few questionable decisions on the CD such as including ‘On The Floor’ by J-Lo but not the version with Pitbull, presumably for licencing or record label reasons, though he does appear on disc two to further compound the mystery. Alas, in including, say, ‘Born This Way’ we don’t get the newer ‘Judas’ or the even newer ‘Edge of Glory’, and it’s like that for several artists.
Disc two is brought to you by the word ‘feature’, causing havoc with the back tracklisting in stretching out to include every guest in the world, with just 7 of the 22 tracks not involving guest artists. There are some absolute classics on this CD with big hits from Pitbull, LMFAO, Example and Snoop Dogg, but equally there are many tracks on here I, as someone who enjoys a wide cross section of music, don’t recognise.
Putting together a Now! compilation in the era of downloading and mix-and-matching tracks is not an easy job, having to appeal to a lot of tastes and including lots of tracks people have already downloaded. That said it’s still a great tracklisting with plenty of classics and recent tracks and just enough to cover the filler.
Buy Now! 79 from the All-Noise music store.
