Don't Fear the Reaper: The Best of Blue Oyster Cult - Blue Oyster Cult
Yet another band that I know songs of, but never owned a CD - so a Greatest Hits package was in order. My all time favorite BOC song is Godzilla, plus I like Don't Fear the Reaper, Burnin' For You. The rest of the stuff isn't all that bad, either. :)
Hi Joe..I wanna say it has been very much the same for me regarding BOC before I actually bought three of their albums on CDs. I had only heard and could recognise a handful of their songs before I made a personal purchase of any BOC album. I can instantly recommend to you their self-titled debut album which I consider to be their ONLY great record. I wonder what the track-listing on this 'Don't Fear the Reaper' Greatest Hits release is like. I'm writing to you mainly cos I wanted to let you know that there's another rather good, worthwhile BOC compilation release titled 'Workshop of the Telescopes'(1995 release, 2-CD, 32 tracks). I think that for most casual BOC fans that like them a fair bit, this double cd compilation could be their only required BOC purchase.
You might be aware that some critics used to call BOC the "poor man's Sabbath'..haha, whatever they meant by that. I personally found BOC an enigmatic, weirdly indecipherable band; thoroughly dual and hard to pin down to a stylistic standard. Hard/soft, heavy/light, wicked, sentimental, inspired, dull, wacky, drossy, dangerous, full of opposites and contradictions. I still think the singer was their weakest link. If the band had been a bit more than merely semi-serious about their intentions and had greater ambitions and talents to carry on musically, I reckon BOC could have been a major heavyweight in Rock, certainly more than some "poor man's" version of other great contemporary bands.