April Wine's Classic Masters

There is nothing "masterful" about this album. It's a bad attempt at putting together some of their best songs on one disc but fails miserably. Probably a sales ploy dreamed up by some industry stiff. These songs are culled from about 5 different albums but don't hold together in a cohesive whole and end up seeming mismatched and forced. And several great songs are left off. I would recommend you just spend a couple extra bucks and pick up the original albums (on disc) namely: First Glance, Harder...Faster, and Nature of the Beast. These are the seminal rock "Classics" of the late 70's early 80's that have all their BEST songs and then some! There is no way a greatest hits record could ever begin to capture all the greatness of these 3 records. Each album is fantastic on it's own, all the way through. These aren't "one big hit with 30 minutes of filler" type records, these records hold together all the way through and just seem to rock harder (and faster) as they go on. April Wine were such an overlooked band it's hard to believe they didn't gain more popularity back in the day. These records hold up to any of the A-list bands of the time...such as Queen, Van Halen, Aerosmith, Judas Priest, I could go on but I won't. Perhaps they were overshadowed by other musical movements of the time such as the rise of New Wave. Maybe if they would have made these records 2 or 3 years earlier they would have hit their peak just at the right time and created more of a noise. For what ever reason, this band didn't see the same radio play or album promotion that other bands did and that is a crime, because the song writing and album production on these records is top notch and sounds even better remastered in the digital age. Other than the over compressed drum sound (what are you gonna do?) of the time, these songs still sound original and fresh today. There are other "best of" collections of April Wine out there that may have a wider overview of songs than this one does, but trust your true feelings, check out Harder...Faster at full volume, doing 20 miles an hour over the speed limit and tell me that album doesn't ROCK.Read full review