Various Artists
Bigger Better Power Ballads
EMI


Time to confess, readers: honestly, you have a bit of soft spot for the power ballad, don't you? Admit it; you can't hear Is This Love by Whitesnake without doing some kind of grasping, clutching hand motions in front of your heart. It's okay - none of us can. And there's no reason to be embarrassed by the fact you know the searing guitar solo in The Scorpions' Wind Of Change is preceded by the irresistible call to "Let your balalaika sing/What my guitar wants to say". We're only human, after all.

So, putting aside that long cultivated indie cred for a while, let's all confess that the key change in the final chorus of Chicago's Hard To Say I'm Sorry is spine-tinglingly great, Eric Carmen's All By Myself has one of the best choruses ever, the opening seconds of Broken Wings by Mr. Mister are genuinely fantastic, and Cutting Crew's (I Just) Died In Your Arms is epically brilliant. As for Don't You (Forget About Me) by Simple Minds, I Want To Know What Love Is by Foreigner, and Poison by Alice Cooper? Chock full of awesome. It's okay to admit it, hipsters. No one is going to confiscate your Gang of Four records.

All that said, though, the problem with the power ballad genre, and therefore this collection, is that it all went pearshaped just after Duran Duran's Ordinary World in 1992. And so we end up with tracks from bands like Live, 4 Non Blondes, Train, 3 Doors Down and Nickelback stinking up the place. Not to mention it also features two of the worst songs of all time: Limp Bizkit's hideous mauling of Behind Blue Eyes and Five For Fighting's incomparably appalling Superman (It's Not Easy). It's a pity, really, because if they'd stuck to the classics, this compilation might actually have been a textbook case of being so bad as to actually prove worth buying.

Alistair Wallis