Various Artists - Then: Totally Oldies 80's Again / Various (CD)

All Music Guide

The second '80sfocused entry in Varese Sarabande's Then: Totally Oldies series mixes it up more than some '80s comps, still concentrating on the New Wave salad days of the first half of the decade, but reaching as far as 1988 and 1989 to include Icehouse's sleek AOR standard "Electric Blue" and the Cult's rampaging "Fire Woman." This gives the collection a bit more diversity, even if there are a lot of familiar tunes at its core, songs like "Centerfold," "You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)," "Whip It," "Walk Like Egyptian," "Down Under" and "Broken Wings" that regularly show up on '80s comps. What distinguishes this one is that there's some interesting choices in the margins, things that make up for the inclusion of the hideous Stars on 45 medley that stops the disc dead in its tracks about halfway through. Discounting that, there are some good things that don't appear all that much on standard '80s collections, such as Get Wet's "Just So Lonely," Benjamin Orr's "Stay the Night" (giving this collection a grand total of two Carsrelated cuts), Pat Benatar's anthemic "We Belong," Love and Rocket's college favorite "No New Tale to Tell," and the Korgis' "Everybody's Got to Learn Sometime," which was revived earlier in 2004 by Beck on the soundtrack for Michel Gondry's brilliant film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. All of these inclusions help make Then 80s Again: Totally Oldies 7 a better than average '80s collection.

- Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide