Concept Albums That Fall Short of Promises

Rhino Records’ new “The Showdown: The Sugarhill Gang Vs. Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five” seems at first glance to be a knockout look at two of the most important groups on Sugar Hill Records, one of the pioneering rap labels.

Similarly, Capitol’s “Divas Exotica” appears to be a fun-packed salute to some of pop’s most sensual performers. And Epic’s “Hot Tracks: Train Super Hits” looks on casual glance like a can’t-miss collection of train-related tunes by such reliable artists as Roy Acuff, Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson.

But beware of all three. The CD retrospectives are reminders of why you should always look twice at albums before buying. What may be a great concept often proves to be a flawed album.

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** 1/2 Various artists, “Divas Exotica,” Capitol. This is a nicely designed package that invites you to listen to some tantalizing selections from a variety of female artists while you read along to the playful liner notes by pop-rock historian Colin Escott. But the mixture of serious vocalists (such as Billie Holiday and Edith Piaf) and novelty ones (including Mamie Van Doren and Brigitte Bardot) proves clumsy in too many places for the album to live up to its promise.

Escott sees April Stevens’ cartoonish “Teach Me Tiger” as “deliriously over-the-top,” but the odds are you’ll find it simply unlistenable--even if the astronauts on the 1983 Challenger space shuttle reportedly requested it as their wake-up song.

Similarly, a variety of screen sirens simply prove colorless--from Bardot (whose French recording of a song whose title translates as “I Give Myself to Whom I Please” is punchless) to Sophia Loren (whose recording of “Zoo Be Zoo Be Zoo” is as goofy as it sounds).

There are moments of appeal, including Holiday’s “Do Your Duty,” Josephine Baker’s “Don’t Touch My Tomatoes” and Astrud Gilberto’s “So Nice (Summer Samba).” But it’s jarring to hear them next to other efforts (by a diverse cast that also includes Marilyn Monroe and Maya Angelou) that border on the kind of celebrity embarrassments that Rhino spotlighted in its landmark “Golden Throats” album.

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* 1/2 Various artists, “The Showdown: The Sugarhill Gang Vs. Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five,” Rhino. This is a promising idea: matching six Sugarhill Gang tracks against six Grandmaster Flash selections in the form of a six-round boxing match, with rappers Chuck D. and Ice-T providing the between-round commentary.

But the commentary and the battle proves strictly no contest.

The Sugarhill Gang’s party-minded approach was pretty much defined by “Rapper’s Delight,” which will always have a place in rap history because the 1979 single was the first formal rap recording to break the national Top 40. But Grandmaster Flash’s socially conscious “The Message” three years later was an infinitely more interesting and influential record, one that helped shape the vision of everyone from Public Enemy to N.W.A.

Though this album suggests these were equal groups, the Grandmaster Flash team was consistently superior, thanks to such subsequent tracks as the techno-based “Scorpio” and the anti-drug “White Lines (Don’t Do It).” Why buy an album that devotes half its time to the Sugarhill Gang when you could turn to another Rhino package (“Message From Beat Street: The Best of Grandmaster Flash, Melle Mel & the Furious Five”) and get more of the vintage Grandmaster Flash material?

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** Various artists, “Hot Tracks; Train Super Hits,” Epic. There’s some classic material in this 33-minute budget CD, including Acuff’s “Wabash Cannonball,” Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” and Billy Joe Shaver’s “Georgia on a Fast Train.”

But Asleep at the Wheel’s version of the old R&B; hit “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie” grates on your nerves quickly, and you’d probably enjoy the Steve Goodman and Guy Clark original versions of their songs “City of New Orleans’ and “Desperados Waiting for a Train,” respectively, more than these interpretations of Nelson and the foursome of Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson.

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Albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor), two stars (fair), three stars (good) and four stars (excellent).