Interestingly, the lone Top 40 hit here – the title cut – is actually an instrumental, but it’s a great one, Milan Williams’s rapid-fire staccato clavinet playing and synth effects evoking the song’s title quite nicely.
#The commodores all the greatest hits zip full#
Funk enthusiasts are truly missing out if they’ve never heard the earliest Commodores LPs, so let’s just jump right into their catalog …Įasily the most funk-oriented album the band ever made (there are no ballads here), Richie and his bandmates have yet to reach their full potential here as songwriters, but these grooves are so irresistible and tight and the chemistry of the band so obvious that it really helps to mask the deficiencies in the writing. Nor do Richie’s albums with the Commodores ever get much attention from critics, either, even though they were one of Motown’s most consistent albums acts during those years, and Richie’s flair for strong melodies and tender ballads has tended to obscure the fact that, in their infancy, the Commodores were a fiery funk outfit, and a very, very good one, at that.
Simply, Richie is easily one of the finest songwriters of his generation (and certainly the best at penning great wedding songs) but doesn’t get nearly enough credit for it these days, and it’s a bit of a mystery why that is – sure, his work since the ‘80s has been spotty, but so has the work of everybody else mentioned above, too. While it may be true that Richie’s albums were never as boundary-pushing or groundbreaking as, say, Prince’s, the quality of the craftsmanship is nearly every bit as evident, and if you listen to the album cuts that surround the big hits on his best albums, it becomes clear that the man should have even more hits to his credit. A mega-star of the highest caliber in the ‘80s (only Michael Jackson, Madonna, Hall & Oates, Prince, & George Michael would have more success during the decade on the Billboard Top 40), Richie – both on his own and as a former member of the Commodores – is responsible for turning out an incredible number of songs that have joined the canon of all-time party classics (“Brick House,” “All Night Long (All Night)”) and wedding standards (“Endless Love,” “Three Times a Lady,” “Truly.”) But it’s a mistake to think of Richie and his former band as simply being great singles acts, and it’s a bit head-scratching that Thriller, Like a Virgin, and Purple Rain are still – though deservedly, of course – remembered and admired so fondly by critics, while you seldom hear any critics bring up Can’t Slow Down these days. There may be no more perfect example of this than Lionel Richie. Perhaps the worst mistake that music critics make is to place as much of an emphasis as they do on breaking new ground innovation is always certainly welcomed where it exists, of course, but too many music critics end up placing such an emphasis on it that they tend to severely underestimate the talents of those musicians who aren’t necessarily doing anything new but do it better than anyone else. Discog Fever is a regular feature on, rating and reviewing a band's entire catalogue of studio albums.
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