95/08

Album Review

Wearing a hoodie and a boy-next-door smile on his face, the Enrique Iglesias on the cover of 95/08 looks nothing like the come-hither Lothario who favored form-fitting shirts during the bulk of his Latin crossover years. There's a reason for that: the Enrique Iglesias of 95/08 is not the Latin heartthrob American audiences were introduced to at the turn of the millennium, but the Spanish-language balladeer — a romantic crooner who was already a superstar long before he set his sights on club airplay and the pop charts. It's this side of Iglesias that 95/08 anthologizes. It's the first collection spanning Iglesias' entire career, even if it's not really concerned with his English-language hits, only those that went to number one on the pop charts. The disc does include one or two of Iglesias' dance smashes, but the focus here is squarely on the ballads — 12 romantic morsels that are as much a part of Iglesias' rise to stardom as of the romantic zeitgeist of Latin pop as a whole. The fact that most of the songs are drawn from Iglesias' '90s catalog and only a few are translated versions of his pop material is a testament to where the singer's forte lies. For that reason, it's a little bewildering that 95/08 is not quite the one-stop source for all of his Latin pop hits. A handful of significant ones are missing, specifically "No Llores por Mí," "Trapecista," "Miente," "Esperanza," and "Para Qué La Vida" — incidentally, all five were included in a separate deluxe edition of the same collection. As it stands, 95/08 is a good and ample collection, albeit not an entirely conclusive hits retrospective from one of Latin music's biggest idols.