RETRO REVIEW 003 - The Rippingtons - Best of the Rippingtons

With all the swagger of a coked out Huey Lewis blowing through the doors of a production music studio in the mid-'80s and screaming "LET'S DO THIS" at a frightened receptionist, Garden of Babylon bursts to life with the kind of opening salvo any knowing montage aficionado would admire. This is peak montage music. This the kind of jam your parents did montages to. 

How many kids learned to judo kick to this song? No one can say for certain, but one can surmise it was quite a few. I did five as I wrote this sentence. Some music is baby-making music, which the Rippingtons traded in as well, but this track? This is '80s action montage-making music.

Tourist in Paradise? What a fucking track. Just closing my eyes I can see Don Johnson dancing down a boardwalk absolutely destroying an order of fish tacos and snapping Polaroids to the amazement of bewildered onlookers.

Affair in San Miguel shamelessly rips off the intro to The Way It Is, but who cares? This is montage music, motherfucker. Anything goes, so strap yourself in and enjoy the dumbbell raises, bucko.

Snowbound? Sounds like a euphemism for "I just did a bunch of coke while listening to Pat Metheny's most commercially viable tunes and then ran screaming to all my bandmates that we need to get to the studio right this minute and lay down a hot ass jam."

Principles of Desire is skeezy as hell—it's clear montage music wasn't the only thing on Russ Freeman's mind when he went into the studio. Nay, we have a regular Pickup Artist on our hands here, plying his trade on the airwaves of the Weather Channel, seducing all those unfortunate enough to wander into a dentist's office reception area in the late '80s and '90s.

There are moments on this album that seemingly answer the age-old question: what would it sound like if Penguin Cafe Orchestra made production music? It's about what you would expect.

She Likes To Watch wants so badly to be a Sade song, and it does a pretty good job of it, in a Sade-via-Weather Channel sort of way.

Overall, this band is exactly as good and exactly as corny as one would expect a group of talented musicians that think the Rippingtons is a passable band name would be. Excellent tracks abound, but the Boomer generation is strong with this one.

7.3442838201/10