Consumer Guide Album

More Girl Group Greats [Rhino, 2001]
Where the magical Girl Group Greats piled on indie miracles--Exciters, Toys, Chiffons, Dixie Cups, Little Eva, Claudine Clark, Ad Libs, holy Jaynetts--its same-year follow-up is keyed to the Universal-controlled Motown and Mercury catalogues, which include many artists with album-strength oeuvres: Supremes, Marvelettes, Shangri-Las, Martha and the Vandellas, Mary Wells, Lesley Gore, eight front-loaded tracks in all. Where the four such selections on the first album were subsumed in its tendency to follow "How did this happen and will it ever happen again?" with "How did I forget that one?," here the big names tend to overshadow even one-of-a-kinds like the Cookies' "Chains" and the Raindrops' "The Kind of Boy You Can't Forget." So my advice to dabblers is to spring for a Marvelettes or Shangri-Las best-of first--after Girl Group Greats, that is. B+