Bee Gees: Love Songs

If you're looking for all the big love ballads of the Brothers Gibb in one place, this will satisfy you... but, given how it hedges its bets in its song selection, perhaps not completely.

Whether they were baroque-pop balladeers with soul, multiplatinum disco daddies, or songwriting legends struggling to find their place in the changing tastes of the Reagan and Clinton years, the Bee Gees never let love stray far from their collective creative minds -- yes, it was good business, but the Brothers Gibb really believed in the power of love to transform and save human beings, a quality as evident in "How Deep Is Your Love" and "To Love Somebody" as in "How Can You Mend A Broken Heart."

All of those songs are present on this new collection, a 18-track overview of the group's best-known love ballads, and that alone will make this comp worth owning to casual fans not willing to fork over the money needed to encompass the group's three-decade-long career. Still, as great ideas go, this one's not executed perfectly; there are a few unnecessary obscurities thrown in to make this one worth it to ostensibly everyone. Robin Gibb's jaunty 1983 solo single, "Juliet," for example, could have easily been replaced by "Massachusetts," easily as much a love song as, say, "Lonely Days," which is also here. You also have to wonder about the omission of smaller hits like "Run To Me" and "Fanny (Be Tender With My Love)," or even choice cuts from their underrated late-sixties and early-seventies albums, at the expense of latter-day album cuts like "Closer Than Close" and "I Could Not Love You More" and mistakes like a funky revamping of "Islands In The Stream." Worthwhile, but flawed.