A month before Warner Music Latina would unleash Olga Tañón's comeback album, Una Nueva Mujer (2005), the label released another compilation of her hits, Como Olvidar: Lo Mejor de Olga Tañón. This was the third Tañón compilation to date, and a very different one from its predecessors: Exitos y Mas (1995) and A Puro Fuego (2003). Unlike those two, Como Olvidar: Lo Mejor de Olga Tañón focuses on Tañón's Latin pop hits, eschewing her merengue era altogether. That may seem unfortunate, since Tañón's merengues are her claim to fame. However, A Puro Fuego had been an absolutely perfect compilation of that key aspect of her career, so to revisit that music would be redundant. Given this logic, Lo Mejor serves a worthy purpose: it compiles the highlights of her scattershot pop-crossover albums -- that is, Te Acordarás de Mí (1998), Yo por Ti (2001), and Sobrevivir (2002), all of which can be forgone safely by everyone except the most devoted Tañón aficionados, as the highlights of those albums are almost all here. Moreover, Lo Mejor also includes three songs from Nuevos Senderos (1996), an overall enjoyable album of Marco Antonio Solís covers. The result is a 12-song mix of hits, sequenced a little haphazardly. (The opening ballad version of "Como Olvidar" is a sleepy nonstarter, while the first energetic song, "Tu Amor," is buried several songs deep.) Lo Mejor isn't perfect, admittedly. Besides the sequencing, it could have easily included several more songs, like "El Niño," "Tú Te Lo Pierdes," and "Caramelo," for instance -- three particularly good songs that are left to languish on their respective albums, sadly. Then again, it would probably be too much to assume that Warner Music Latina would actually issue a definitive greatest-hits album. Given the label's carrot-and-stick approach to back-catalog merchandising, Lo Mejor is about all a discretionary consumer could expect, and as such, it's an ideal complement to the aforementioned A Puro Fuego compilation of merengues.
© Jason Birchmeier /TiVo