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THE BEST OF

I have done my very best to be polite about this release, really, I have and the best words to sum up this compilation are total crap!

An awful mess that is basically a bastardisation of the Influence compilation from three years ago aimed at the budget price supermarket range of CDs, you know the ones, those that they can never sell.

Influence was well thought out as it had, for the most part, the Who's Afraid Of The Art Of Noise material seperated from that of The Seduction Of Claude Debbusy period by including the tracks recorded for China Records. That has been removed and the tracks from the two ZTT albums have been jumbled together without any thought, everyone knows that music from those two long players doesn't gel together, apart from the person or persons responsible for this budget-priced cash in.

Archive demo tracks that appeared on the Into Battle With The Art Of Noise and Influence compilations have been thrown in as fillers to make up for the missing material from 1985-1989. This set is a good example of record companies putting out music that they have no idea about, in this case Union Square Music, the parent of the Salvo label that is in partnership with ZTT.

Over the last few years, ZTT's back catalogue has been reissued with a lot of care and attention in the form of quality double deluxe edition CDs as part of the label's Element series with more planned releases in the pipeline. This release, the so called The Best Of mocks that hard work and for first time Art of Noise listeners, it will more likely be their first and last purchase as it so bad.

Seeing that this is Union Square's attempt at celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of ZTT Records, they have made a pig's ear of it. It would have been better to have put out a double CD set of Who's Afraid Of The Art Of Noise and The Seduction Of Claude Debussy in their original forms. This is one of a series of three compilations, the others being by Frankie Goes To Hollywood and Propaganda.

If you are new to Art of Noise please avoid this release and purchase Influence as your introduction instead. Even die-hard fans will probably have to think twice about this one.

- KM Whitehouse, September 2013