VARIOUS ARTISTS
The Cher Collection (Tribute To Cher) (Dressed To Kill)
Reviewed by Bill Holmes

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Dressed To Kill seems incapable of giving you the entire package when it comes to liner notes. More often than not, the four-sided booklet is composed of cover art (usually pretty good), a track listing on the back (usually accurate) and two blank pages in-between (great for doodling!). So while it's been interesting to hear decent work by bands like Eddy Bop or The Butchers, finding out information about them has been next to impossible. So when I saw that there were actually liner notes on this collection, I was excited…that is, until I realized that this took the place of listing the band names next to the tracks they performed. Come on; are these performers in the witness protection program? Famous artists performing under assumed names? Or is the label too clueless and/or cheap to do things right? (Doubtful, no way, probably).

The Cher Collection is supposed to be about Cherilyn Sarkasian's solo career, but I'll forgive the inclusion of "I Got You Babe", the song that probably brought her to everyone's attention in the first place. Instrumentally, the track is pretty close to the original, as "Sonny" sings just flat enough and "Cher" pilots that goat-quiver vocal style. "I Found Someone" and "If I Could Turn Back Time", two of her better post-Bono hits, get decent workouts but won't make you ditch the originals anytime soon. Even "Believe' has that digitally enhanced inhuman vocal production that got the dance floor full but had many convinced that Cher could no longer cut it without studio cut-and-paste technology. There are also a couple of songs recorded at incredibly low volume levels, inexcusable for even a homemade CDR (the Roxy Music tribute also suffers this fate).

Dressed To Kill's tribute line is moderately priced in the US, available through mail order for about six or seven dollars. Even with that discount, I'd recommend this one only to diehard completists or (gulp) tribute addicts.

© 2000 - Bill Holmes