Sash! The Best of

Continuing on my semi-reviews of this fall's greatest hits collections, it's time to look back at the career of Sash!, the German producer who during the late '90s and early '00s had a fairly impressive run of nine UK top 10 hits, five of which hit #2--quite a lot to never get a #1.

Sash! The Best of includes his 10 UK hits, a few other singles that weren't big in the UK, two versions of new track "Raindrops," and the ballad version of "Just Around the Hill." A second disc includes three remixes of "Ecuador," "Stay," "La Primavera," and "Mysterious Times." This seems a little odd, rather than having mixes of many of the songs.

His first hit was "Encore Une Fois," which hit #2 in the spring of 1997. It was followed in the summer by a second #2 hit, "Ecuador," and then a third in the fall, "Stay," the first in English after the French and Spanish hits. In early 1998 he released the first of four tracks from a second album, the Italian "La Primavera," which hit #3, before hitting #2 again with "Mysterious Times." Several other top 10 hits followed over the next couple years, including another #2 hit, "Adelante."

To a casual listener, Sash! sounds like any ol' eurodance artist. What makes his songs special, is that they show a great deal of ingenuity for a genre that even in 1997 was getting long in the tooth (and hasn't changed much since). His use of multiple languages was inventive, and his songs had better than average melodies for most clubby music--really a pop sensibility. While mostly instrumental tracks like "Encore Une Fois" and "La Primavera," are ready made club tunes, others like "Stay" and "Mysterious Times" could be considered dance pop, as they follow the traditional verse-chorus-verse format.

"Stay" has to be my favorite Sash! single, which has a pretty cool layered synth melody for its chorus. I also really like "Mysterious Times," which is somewhat similar to "Stay," and "Encore Une Fois," with its hard hitting synth line. And i'm partial to "La Primavera" because it came out while I was a student in London. It sounds a bit like the Chariots of Fire theme.

"Encore Une Fois" was sampled in 2006 by UK dance artist Stunt, who added an English vocal to make the single "Raindrops." This appears in two new versions here as "Raindrops (Encore Une Fois)," which hit #9 last month, giving Sash! his first UK hit in 9 years.

Unless you're a big dance music fan this probably isn't something you'd want to sit and listen to straight through, but these do sound great in mixes with other songs, particularly from the late '90s era in which he was big.