Canter Bridge

Bryan Adams’ 1996 compilation of greatest hits is all about cheap thrills. With lyrics like `The only thing that looks good on me … is you’, `I just wanna’ be … your underwear’, you don’t buy this album after a hard think about whether to spend your nine bucks on this or on, say, that new translation of Homer’s Odyssey. You plunk down your cash for good, old-fashioned, hedonistic, irreverent rock & roll. The second most overused line in assessments of Bryan’s music—after `the Canadian rocker’—seems to be `feel-good rocker’.

With good reason.

Adams is very good on the classic rock themes, most notably `The Only Thing’, I Wanna’ Be’ (both quoted above), and It Ain’t a Party … If You Can’t Come `Round’. The superb `’Black Pearl’, with its awesome bass track and exquisitely driving tempo, leads this pack.

He can also toss off a memorable ballad, revealing in the process an uncanny debt to Rod Stewart: `Let’s Make a Night to Remember’, `I Think About You’, `I’ll Always Be Right There’, `You’re Still Beautiful to Me’. Here the most memorable is that swan song of besotted pub crawlers everywhere with its flamenco-esque guitar, `Have You Ever Loved a Woman’.

On the other hand, an unsettling pair of losers has made it on to this anthology under the titles `Do to you’ and `We’re Gonna Win’. Adams is much better than these two songs. And while we’re at it, it’s not obvious to this reviewer—clearly lots of CD buyers thought otherwise—why the vacuous `18 til I die’ was such a hit and even the claimed the title track on this collection.

I never thought I’d describe a musician as more irreverent and hedonistic than the aforementioned Stewart, but Bryan Adams just may claim the crown. Hedonism of this kind—as opposed to that of John Piper, for example—is not an ethic that commends itself to this reviewer. The music, however, has some foot-stomping good tunes as its vehicle. And this was only 1996. Adams was hardly done. Some of his best work, both before and after the releast of `18 til I Die’, does not appear here. One things of `Everything I Do’, `Cuts Like a Knife’, `Do I Have to Say the Words’, `Summer of `69′, and—perhaps his best song—’Please Forgive Me’.

This is a good place to begin to listen to Bryan Adams’ music. The CD will not give you a full picture of his body of work. Rock on, you Canadian feel-goody crooner guy.