***1/2 Yaz

THE BEST OF YAZ

(Reprise)

Seventeen years ago, Vince Clarke and Alison Moyet, then unknown musicians, joined together as Yaz to create an electronic dance-music update of the kind of soulful deep blues that Big Mama Thornton and her disciple Janis Joplin had once pursued. The duo stayed together through only two albums, but they created enough great music to justify this retrospective.

All the hits are here -- "Situation," "State Farm," "Nobody's Diary," "Don't Go," and "Only You" -- along with several remixes and lesser-known album tracks. Moyet's voice is deeper than sexy hell, and like Giorgio Moroder with Donna Summer, Clarke, whose fine-fingered electronic touch was much snappier (though far less dreamy) than Moroder's, uses his breezy light riffs to lift Moyet high while her soaring howls lift the music higher still. Theirs was a special bond. Moyet has never, in all her long solo career, sounded so glamorous as she did in Yaz. And Clarke, who went on to form Erasure, was never again this accurate and succinct. Yaz's music rose and it grooved and it snapped, a brazen and glamorous thing. And thanks to this reissue, it lives again.

-- Michael Freedberg