Genre:
Latin
Release Date: 03/25/2008
Wearing a hoodie and a boy next door smile on his face, the
Enrique Iglesias on the cover of
95/08 looks nothing like the come-hither Lothario who favored form-fitting shirts during the bulk of his Latin crossover years. There's a reason for that: the
Enrique Iglesias of
95/08 is not the Latin heartthrob American audiences were introduced to at the turn of the millennium, but the Spanish-language balladeer -- a romantic crooner who was already a superstar long before he set his sights on club airplay and the pop charts. It's this side of
Iglesias that
95/08 anthologizes. It's the first collection spanning
Iglesias' entire career, even if it's not really concerned with his English-language hits, only those that went to number one on the pop charts. The disc does include one or two of
Iglesias' dance smashes, but the focus here is squarely on the ballads -- 12 romantic morsels that are as much a part of
Iglesias' rise to stardom as of the romantic zeitgeist of Latin pop as a whole. The fact that most of the songs are drawn from
Iglesias' '90s catalog and only a few are translated versions of his pop material is a testament to where the singer's forte lies. For that reason, it's a little bewildering that
95/08 is not quite the one-stop source for all of his Latin pop hits. A handful of significant ones are missing, specifically
"No Llores por Mí," "Trapecista," "Miente," "Esperanza," and
"Para Qué La Vida" -- incidentally, all five were included in a separate deluxe edition of the same collection. As it stands,
95/08 is a good and ample collection, albeit not an entirely conclusive hits retrospective from one of Latin music's biggest idols. [The deluxe edition of
95/08 includes five number one singles that were omitted from the standard edition, making it an excellent recapitulation of
Iglesias' career hit singles.]
~Andree Farias, All Music Guide
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