Bad for Good: The Very Best of Scorpions

Clocking in at 79 minutes and 55 seconds, the Scorpions have yet another greatest-hits compilation, this 2002 release on Hip-O entitled Bad for Good: The Very Best of the Scorpions. Two brand-new recordings can be found closing out the disc on tracks 17 and 18, produced again by Dieter Dierks, who is represented on 11 of the dozen-and-a-half titles here. Both songs, "Cause I Love You" and "Bad for Good," are in-the-pocket Scorpions performances, the kind of thing longtime fans expect, which the Scorpions wisely oblige. The six pages of Gerri Miller's liner notes, written in 2002, don't give too much detail on these new tracks, but the essay is a great overview of the group's career and is as essential as the 96k/24-bit mastering used on this single-disc CD. Though Universal had already released a 12-song 20th Century Masters -- The Millennium Collection: The Best of Scorpions in 2001, and more than two and a half hours on 1997's 33-track Deadly Sting: The Mercury Years, Bad for Good: The Very Best of the Scorpions does live up to the title. Sure, "Rock You Like a Hurricane," "Loving You Sunday Morning," and "No One Like You" all invert and pervert that wonderful Pete Townshend riff from "I Can't Explain," but they are such wonderful and highly creative inversions which sound great alongside that Who gem, produced here in fine fashion by Bruce Fairbairn, that the Scorpions rock harder than the Who, polishing the grit of AC/DC and fusing the two sounds of those ensembles to create a very accessible and commercial formula. If you are into the group you can just hit play and repeat, for every track is a winner. The booklet contains whatever chart positions the songs may have obtained (mostly on the U.S. album rock charts).