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Title: Cooleyhighharmony
Release date: 26 May, 2009
Record label: Hip-O Select
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Official website: Boyz II Men
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“In R&B there may be nothing more enduring than the male vocal group,” writes Amy Linden in the liner notes to this exciting new package. “In the nineties no group kept that legacy alive better, or more successfully, than Boyz II Men ... With a pulsating sound?what they called “Hip-Hop Doo Wop” seamless smoothed out harmonies, and collaborations with pop/R&B’s preeminent songwriters and producers, including Babyface, Daryl Simmons and L.A. Reid, Boyz II Men revived urban music. And it all kicked off with Cooleyhighharmony.”
Now, for the first time, is a 2-CD edition of the classic album that features rare remixes not heard since their original release, the album in its original 1991 sequence and two unreleased tracks, all in a beautifully designed package.
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Discovered by New Edition member Michael Bivins, Boyz II Men were a modernized version of the Motown Sound. They were a smash out of the box with “Motownphilly,” then came right back a hip, a cappella version of the ballad “It’s So Hard To Say Goodbye To Yesterday,” a Motown chestnut first made popular by G.C. Cameron in the 1975 film Cooley High—the inspiration for the album title.
Cooleyhighharmony would eventually produce five hit singles and gather several awards. But the album’s life was hardly finished, as in its wake Boyz II Men released the soundtrack songs “End Of The Road” and “In The Still Of The Night (I’ll Remember),” a cover of a doo-wop perennial. Those cuts were added to a 1993 reissue of the album, along with other cuts, and the album was re-sequenced and given new artwork.
Cooleyhighharmony: Expanded Edition restores the album’s original sequence, placing the ’93 bonus tracks at the end of disc one. Disc two gathers up several more remixes, with most not included on the group’s 1995 set The Remix Collection, as well as two of “Under Pressure” that were previously unreleased in the U.S. Another highlight of the set are two newly discovered tracks from the sessions, produced by Troy Taylor and Charles Farrar, a.k.a. the production team The Characters, who had contributed “Little Things” and “Your Love” to the original album.
The set includes a photo gallery of Nate, Wanya, Shawn and Michael, several outtakes from their LP session shoot, the afore-mentioned essay, the original track annotations and additional info— a fitting tribute to a modern classic.
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