**1/2 THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO: MUSIC FROM THE MOTION PICTURE

(Work Group)

Judging from the glut of nearly identical collections flooding the market these days, you could swear that what killed disco wasn't the evil machinations of history's favorite scapegoat -- joyless white heterosexual men -- but rather, too much of too little for too long. The disco era actually yielded some incredibly innovative tracks, which is something you might never know from the way so many disco compilations revisit the same 30 or so classics. Despite a few momentary flashes (Evelyn "Champagne" King's "I Don't Know If It's Right," Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes' "The Love I Lost"), The Last Days of Disco wastes an opportunity to pull some lesser-known tunes out of the dusty DJ crates of history. And the absence of anything from the Casablanca Records catalogue, home to Donna Summer and the Village People, is a glaring omission. That said, the cuts included here -- particularly Diana Ross's "I'm Coming Out" and Sister Sledge's "He's the Greatest Dancer" -- are uniformly wonderful. And if The Last Days of Disco can sprinkle a little pixie dust into the lives of a few angst-ridden youngsters who may never savor such abandon first-hand, then predictable programming can be pardoned.

-- Kurt B. Reighley