Various

Smooth Rock RHINO

Four discs aimed at easy listening fans in deep denial.

Call it AOR, Yacht Rock, or simply Soft Rock – which ever way you contrive to carve it, it isn’t really rock at all. Fundamentally it’s music for people that like the tossed hair and the flapped denim flare of the rock lifestyle (at its most Californian, countrified and caucasian) but balk at the crass, offensive clangour of the rock sound.

All those crude guitars and why so much anger? Like Mars bars, taken as part of a balanced diet each of these 80 tracks will do you no real harm, but you couldn’t live on them.

Here, 10cc are revealed to be a Tin Pan Alley hit machine masquerading as prog, Robert Palmer’s Every Kind Of People an unpunished crime against humanity and Pilot’s Magic just that. Elsewhere, Michael McDonald emotes like a cartoon bear with a strangulated hernia and J Geils repeats the refrain ‘Must of got lost’ as if it were somehow grammatically correct.

Among selections too insipid to register there’s undeniable brilliance from James Taylor, Seals And Crofts, Todd Rundgren, Rickie Lee Jones and Bread (represented on each disc, David Gates is revealed to be smooth’s ultimate exponent). After hours of cocktail-lounge keying, Foreigner’s flaccid riffs start to sound like Slayer, ELO some kind of punk band, and your mind wanders. How does insomnia sustain in a world where Gram Parsons’s Love Hurts is readily available without prescription? How can life ever be the same after catching your foot tapping to When You’re In Love With A Beautiful Woman?

Ultimately what we have here is a Sing Something Simple for the rolled-up suit-sleeve set. You’ll certainly find some pleasure here, but mostly, feelings of nauseating guilt.