Chic - Original Album Series (5CD Box Set) (2011)

Warners’ Original Album Series – placing five facsimile vinyl-sleeve CDs in boxes – has truly hit the jackpot here with their Chic selection. Combining two relatively easy to get hold of albums with three that have only been on import.

To own C’est Chic and Risqué, two of the greatest albums ever, together, for less than £15, is something very special. It’s all here on these two – the soulfully blank, repetitive vocals, the angular guitar, the warm bath of strings and horns and Bernard Edwards’ remarkable and audacious bass – the sound that launched a thousand imitators. Good Times is your high watermark on Risqué, while C’est Chic’s embarrassment of riches offers I Want Your Love, Le Freak and At Last I Am Free, a gift that goes on giving.

The other three? Their debut, Chic, is full of moderately generic grooves (as well as calling cards Everybody Dance and Dance, Dance, Dance, Dance (Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah)), while 1980’s Real People was recorded at the height of their fame; disco was starting to suck, and there is paranoia and bitterness coursing though the grooves. Meanwhile, the following year’s Take It Off is the best Chic record that most have never heard. Looking their gift horse in the mouth, they made a pared-down Talking Heads record. It includes Flash Back, a song that was already nostalgic for their heyday (only two years previous), topped off by a most un-Nile Rodgers-like guitar solo.