The Seventies Generation: 1972

Retro's Seventies Generation series is made up of bargain basement-quality discs that look like decent ten-song collections of the pop hits of the day, focusing mostly on the AM dial. The brevity of the discs is a problem, but the real thing that makes these discs so lackluster is that each of the songs is a re-recording, not the original version. Most of the songs are done by the original artist who actually had the hit but their voices are older and the music is generally much, much worse. At best a track will sound like a decent wedding band, at worst it will sound like Dale from Marketing crooning drunkenly on karaoke night. The 1972 volume contains really bad remakes of "Nice to Be With You" by Gallery, "Oh Girl" by the Chi-Lites and "Baby Blue" by Badfinger. It also has two very sad demolition jobs on classic songs that never, ever should have been contemplated, much less perpetrated; Mott the Hoople's creaky "All the Young Dudes" and Cornelius Brothers & Sister Rose's soulless "Too Late to Turn Back Now." Not only do these remakes tarnish the images of the artists who participate, it foists some inept and patently fake music on casual fans of the '70s who might not know any better. As Shirley and Company would say: "Shame, shame, shame, shame, shame/Shame on you."