The Best of Spirit

Album Review

It's true that Spirit were a very album-oriented band, one that might best be experienced through albums rather than compilations. If you do want those albums, the first four and best of them are all available on CD, sometimes with bonus tracks. If a compilation's good enough for you, this is a good one to get, its 16 songs drawing pretty equally from those four initial Ode/Epic albums. Basically, it's an expanded edition of the 1973 compilation The Best of Spirit, which consisted of the first 11 songs on this disc, though this version adds five more tracks and updated liner notes. Granted, the band's mere handful of well-known songs are gotten out of the way right away ("1984," "Mechanical World," "Nature's Way," "Animal Zoo," "Fresh-Garbage," "I Got a Line on You"). But the rest of it's pretty solid too, including "Uncle Jack," a high point of pseudo-Beatleish psychedelia, and "Taurus," which (in)famously includes an acoustic guitar riff extremely similar to the one that cropped up a few years later in Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven." Given the tendency of some of the albums from which these are taken to meander, this is actually a good alternative for the listener who likes Spirit's most accessible tunes, but isn't enamored of their full-length works.