Celine Dion – All The Way… A Decade Of Song (1999) [Reissue 2001]
PS3 Rip | ISO | SACD DST64 2.0 & 5.1 > 1-bit/2.8224 MHz | 74:04 minutes | Scans included | 5,96 GB
or FLAC 2.0 Stereo (converted with foobar2000 to tracks) 24bit/88,2 kHz | 71:32 mins | Scans included | 1,57 GB

There aren’t a lot of greatest-hits albums with seven new songs, which is exactly what All the Way: A Decade of Song is. There are just nine hits on this hits collection, and of those, only a handful — “If You Asked Me To,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Power of Love,” “Because You Loved Me,” “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now,” and “My Heart Will Go On” — were huge hits in the U.S. Her first American hit, “Where Does My Heart Beat Now,” isn’t here, nor is her duet with Barbra Streisand, “Tell Him.” Naturally, this means it’s not a definitive collection, but rather an unsatisfying album that feels suspiciously like a piece of product. The best of the hits, like the Meat Loaf-ian epic “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now” and “My Heart Will Go On,” are certainly among the best adult contemporary songs of the decade, and the new stuff would pale in comparison, even if it was very good — which, by and large, it is not. Two numbers, the danceable “That’s the Way it Is” and the pretty ballad “If Walls Could Talk,” work, but the cover of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” falls flat and “All the Way,” complete with old vocals from Sinatra, is a disaster. The remaining three aren’t bad, but they’re not particularly memorable, especially compared to the hits. And that’s the problem with All the Way — if it had been a straight hits collection, with “That’s the Way it Is” and “If Walls Could Talk” added to the end, it would have been fine, but padding it with nearly a full album worth of new material hurts it.

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Celine Dion – Falling Into You (1996) [Reissue 2015]
PS3 Rip | SACD ISO | DSD64 2.0 > 1-bit/2.8224 MHz | 76:00 minutes | Scans NOT included | 3,04 GB
or FLAC(converted with foobar2000 to tracks) 24bit/88,2 kHz | Scans NOT included | 1,43 GB
Numbered, Limited Edition Hybrid SACD | 39th Grammy Awards winner for Album of the Year and Best Pop Album

Celine Dion’s Falling into You returned the Canadian vocalist to the top of the American charts, and for good reason. Although the album is formulaic, it’s a well-executed, stylish, and catchy formula, accentuating her natural vocal charm. Dion shines on ballads like “Because You Love Me” and mock epics like Jim Steinman’s “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now.” Between those two peaks, she tackles dance-pop and love songs with grace; that effortless elegance saves the mediocre material on the album from being tedious. Though there are a couple of weak tracks, Falling into You is a remarkably well-crafted set of adult contemporary pop and Dion’s best album.

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Celine Dion – The Essential Celine Dion (2011) [3xSACD]
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88.2kHz | Time –  02:28:15 minutes | 3,09 GB | Genre: Pop
Source: ISO SACD | ©  Columbia Records | Recorded: 1990–2008

Following the first Celine Dion collection, All the Way: A Decade of Song, by roughly a decade, The Essential Celine Dion doubles almost everything about the initial collection: it covers two decades instead of one and has three discs, not one. It’s almost an overcompensation for how All the Way concentrated on newer recordings at the expense of hits, but then again, Celine has had more hits in the ten years since All the Way, so it makes sense that Essential is a bigger, grander collection. The problem is, apart from her cover of Roy Orbison’s “I Drove All Night,” almost none of her new-millennium hits are as memorable as her singles from the ’90s, so this triple CD doesn’t offer too much of an enticement for fans to replace 1999’s single-disc set. But for those listeners who are looking for an overview of Celine Dion’s two decades as an international superstar, Essential fits the bill well as it has all her big adult contemporary hits — “Where Does My Heart Beat Now,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “If You Asked Me To,” “Because You Loved Me,” “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now,” and “My Heart Will Go On” — all sequenced chronologically. –Stephen Thomas Erlewine (more…)