The Four Seasons

This budget-priced three-CD set contains 36 tracks and runs 104 minutes, which means it could have fit on two CDs with plenty of room to spare. The tracks, most of which were credited to the Four Seasons, not "Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons," when they were first released between 1962 and 1970 ("Secret Love" was a solo recording by Valli), include all of the group's Top Ten hits of the period except "Save It for Me" and "Tell It to the Rain," as well as several that made the Top 40. To fill out the collection, the unnamed compiler has used Four Seasons covers of hits by other performers, especially doo-wop vocal groups like Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers ("Why Do Fools Fall in Love"), the Crests ("16 Candles"), and the Skyliners ("Since I Don't Have You"), as well as early-'60s contemporaries like Sam Cooke ("You Send Me"), Neil Sedaka ("Oh! Carol," "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do"), and Dionne Warwick ("Walk on By"). Of course, these are the same songs the Four Seasons used to fill up their albums in the '60s. (The cover of the Harptones' "A Sunday Kind of Love" is a rarity in that it was included only on early copies of the 1965 LP The 4 Seasons Entertain You before being replaced by another track on later pressings.) The use of them means that the material will be familiar to the listener, even when the hits are not those of the group itself. The sequencing is roughly chronological, at least in terms of the Four Seasons hits, with the covers interspersed without regard to chronology. There are no annotations. This is thus a bare-bones anthology that nevertheless delivers most of the Four Seasons' best-remembered '60s songs and several excellent performances of other standards. ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide