Mark Spiro
2+2=5: Best of + Rarities

Mark Spiro has a pretty impressive career being featured on over 100 million sold records and having earned 45 gold and platinum records, ha has written music for plenty of artists and done music for several movies like Top Gun, True Romance and many others. Here he has put together his best songs and some previously unreleased rarities from his long and successful career. This is a pretty massive release with three CDs that each contains at least a dozen tracks, and it plays for almost three hours if you play through the entire release in one go.

Well, as I so expertly described it last time I wrote about Spiro, it is laid back melodic rock music, often with catchy choruses, strong production and good vocals. I think the title track from It’s a Beautiful Life stands out for me when I listen, perhaps because that album is the solo effort I like best. As Spiro often fits into this kind of melodic laid back soft rock kind of music it is mostly that we hear when playing through the tracks and this, there are some variations to this but it can feel like it all melts together into a big mass if you pay though the entire thing in one go.

It is a strong hit-parade the goes on for a long while, and there are so many great songs that they tend to cancel each other out after a while. The good thing is that you can play the CDs as stand-alone albums and then they are all very strong and enjoyable and that is a decent amount of music to take in one go as well. It is a strong document over the music of Mark Spiro and probably a really complete document over his career that covers most of you Mark Spiro needs for a long time to come. And each CD is probably excellent as music to listen to in the car on a long drive, enjoyable music that goes on for a long time.

A bit too much of the good stuff, if you judge it as you would judge a normal studio album. But it is a strong collection of songs and if you want to have a showcase of the artist Mark Spiro this is probably the most complete you can find, and as it is split in three CDs and not a coherent album as such you can listen to just one and that too much of the good stuff disappears. I enjoy listening to this one, especially if I take it in smaller doses, so I think that it can be worth getting as the price of the CD-edition isn’t too expensive either. You can listen to it and imagine that you have a beautiful life for a while.

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