** Sting and the Police

THE VERY BEST OF . . . STING & THE POLICE

(A&M)

If not for the grandiosely titled 1994 collection Fields of Gold: The Best of Sting 1984-1994, one might be led to wonder whether this new rehash of material that's appeared at least twice elsewhere isn't Sting's way of tacitly admitting that his solo work doesn't quite stand up on its own. But regardless of whether Sting actually needs to fill out a hits collection with Police tunes, doing so doesn't shed a very favorable light on his solo work: next to Police classics like "Message in a Bottle," "Don't Stand So Close to Me," "Can't Stand Losing You," and "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic," even Sting's biggest solo hits ("If You Love Somebody Set Them Free" and "If I Ever Lose My Faith in You") are no damn fun. The beauty of The Very Best of . . . Sting & the Police is the way it rudely, if subtly, attempts to play down the role of Sting's Police partners (Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland), who are made out to be nothing more than Sting's backing band, which was never the case. Anyway the real goal of this collection, which features a funkified Puff Daddy remix of "Roxanne," is to capitalize on the success of Puffy's cover of the Police's "Every Breath You Take." And when Puff says "I like this part" right before "I love you since I knew you," you kinda know what he means -- as dated as a Police tune like "Roxanne" may sound, it still beats the hell out of a bland number like Sting's "Russians."

-- Matt Ashare