Universal Smash Hits, Vol. 2

The second volume of Universal Smash Hits follows the first with a wide swath of hits from 2002 and 2003. The broad stylistic range makes this disc all but impossible to be enjoyed from front to back by the average music fan. Rather than offer the tidy snapshot that the Now That's What I Call Music! series has made its stock-in-trade, this disc comes off like a cheap imitation, especially since it shuts out hits from labels with other distributors. Even so, there are worse ways for those who don't buy albums to obtain a number of recent hits. The highlights include David Banner's "Like a Pimp," Wayne Wonder's "No Letting Go," Lumidee's "Never Leave You (Uh Oooh)," and Aaliyah's "Miss You." (The painstakingly sequenced shifts from rap to sophisticated R&B to adult contemporary to country to post-grunge are rather funny.)