The Best Of The Penguins

The Best of the Mercury Years isn’t all that it appears to be. Instead of presenting all of the Penguins’ hit singles, it only presents the group’s Mercury recordings, which means that neither of the two versions of “Earth Angel” on the disc are the original hit single versions, and that the remainder of their classic Dootone sides are missing. That’s said, what is here is good, and may be of interest to hardcore doo wop collectors. – Stephen Thomas Erlewine