Consumer Guide Album

The Pointer Sisters: Greatest Hits [RCA, 1989]
What a strange story. First they abandon retro chic for the Richard Perry mainstream, with three gems and much dreck to show for it--only the gems save the premature best-of that marked the departure of Perry's Elektra-distributed Planet label for RCA. After one ground-breaking hit, the only decent regular-release album of their lengthy career adds three more classics to their oeuvre, all in the perfervid robot-disco style of "I'm So Excited." And then--and here's the really weird part--it's over. Five years after Break Out, with scads of failed group and solo projects behind and a Motown contract ahead, this postmature best-of lives and dies with the same four robot-disco classics (remixed, though at least not newly remixed) and the same three mainstream gems. I hate to think what they spent their money on. A-