Greatest Hits (1991)


 

  1.Magical Mystery Tour
  2.Dream Police
  3.Don't Be Cruel
  4.Tonight It's You
  5.She's Tight
  6.I Want You To Want Me (Live)
  7.If You Want My Love
  8.Ain't That a Shame (Live)
  9.Surrender
 10.The Flame
 11.I Can't Take It
 12.Can't Stop Falling Into Love
 13.Voices

 

By the early 1990s, Cheap Trick found themselves navigating the well-trodden territory of contractual compilation. Having parted ways with Epic Records—whether by choice or by quiet boardroom dismissal—Greatest Hits arrived not as a celebration, but as an obligatory summation. Predictably, the result is a mixed bag: a semi-official reckoning with a chart legacy that was never quite as consistent as their cult stature suggested.

The compilation does an adequate, if uninspired, job of charting the band’s commercial peaks. The requisite singles are accounted for - Surrender, I Want You To Want Me, and Dream Police, and the lumbering late-period success The Flame—presented in chronological disarray, as if to preempt too close an inspection of the band’s more erratic years. Still, the omission of selections from All Shook Up and The Doctor is conspicuous and, arguably, merciful. These albums, as fans and detractors alike may recall, bookended the group’s most creatively arid era. Silence, in this case, is editorial eloquence.

The addition of a new track—a cover of The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour—is less a gift than a curiosity. One suspects its inclusion was meant to suggest lineage, but what emerges is an overproduced, joyless run-through, closer to contractual filler than heartfelt homage. Where the original is wide-eyed and strange, Cheap Trick’s version feels padded and effortful, a band struggling to recapture not just someone else’s magic, but their own.

For casual listeners, Greatest Hits is serviceable, if oddly airbrushed. For longtime followers, it’s a reminder of how Cheap Trick's story has always resisted clean arcs or definitive packages. A better compilation would have embraced the contradictions—genius and misstep alike. This one prefers to keep its narrative tidy.

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