First, to be clear, this is certainly not the only Drifters album you'll ever need, and it may well be one of the last ones you'll ever need. This is fare from the latter-day Drifters. By the 1970s the Drifters had splintered into several separate touring groups, one of which was led by Johnny Moore. Moore, recognizing that the group had always been popular in Britain, moved there and enlisted Bill Fredericks, Gant Kitchings, and Butch Leak to form yet another incarnation of the group, which then signed to Bell Records in 1973. This set, drawn from the Bell era, shows the British Drifters to be but a pale shadow of their earlier configurations, and the material they recorded slides to the bland and at times to the near-disco side of things. There are a few glimmers of past glory, most notably on "Kissin' in the Back Row of the Movies," which has the feel but not quite the accomplished joy of a classic Drifters side, and a somewhat overblown version of Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline," but on the whole, what's collected here hardly lives up to the original group's considerable recorded legacy.
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