Album: The Miracles, Depend on Me – The Early Albums (Motown)

The first five albums, on two discs. And you should hold them as close as a teen lover.

Post-war pop never twinkled like this again. In Smokey Robinson, Berry Gordy had a suburban romantic poet for the ages applying himself to the creation of the nascent Motown house sound. A lot of what resulted in 1961-63 is, of course, genre mash but every note of it is alive with the electricity of new birth. In some versions of heaven there's a jukebox with nothing on it but this stuff and Chuck Berry. Kill me now.