Timeless. The Classics

It's hard to resist the notion that Michael Bolton, who took considerable flak in the press for storming the charts with copycat reproductions of '60s soul hits felt "suddenly compelled," as he put it here in a sleeve note, to devote an entire album to cover songs after publicly confronting his critics at the Grammy Awards ceremony in February 1992. There's not much you can do with "Yesterday" or "White Christmas" at this point. On the other hand, as with his previous R&B appropriations, versions of songs like the Four Tops' "Reach Out I'll Be There" and Sam and Dave's "Hold On, I'm Comin'" only succeeded in confirming Bolton's inferiority to his predecessors. — William Ruhlmann.