Lush
Ciao! Best of Lush
4AD

Each Greatest Hits-type album is greeted with the inevitable criticism of the track listing. Everyone wants to see his or her favorite album represented with more songs, and there are almost always questions of "Why did they put that song on there?" or "Where's 'Freebird?'" Then, and I won't even get started on this, there's the practice of putting unreleased songs on a Greatest Hits.

Ciao! Best of Lush is part of a seemingly endless campaign by British record label 4AD to capitalize on past glories — The Cocteau Twins, Pixies, Heidi Berry and Modern English have all recently seen back-catalogue reissues, prompting some of us to hold out for the inevitable "Pump Up the Volume" remix album — and largely escapes this trap. In fact, it is such a resounding success of a Greatest Hits album, it renders obsolete two of the group's three albums and serves a better introduction than Split, the group's signature album.

On its early singles (collected in the United States on a CD called Gala) and first album, Spooky, the foursome headed by Miki Berenyi and Emma Anderson fit the mold of the British early '90s shoegazing scene, which led to them being lumped in with a whole lot of bands (Pale Saints, My Bloody Valentine and The Boo Radleys were among the better ones) with a few things in common.

But unlike the blurry, androgynous vocals of My Bloody Valentine, the lonely, nasal singing of The Boo Radleys and Ride or the strangely off-kilter tone of Pale Saints' Ian Masters, the voices behind Lush made it unmistakably a girls' band.

Ethereal and floating, Berenyi and Anderson's singing on early singles rode atop dreamy, jangly pop songs (like the VW-ad-featured "Sweetness and Light," which appears on this album) frequently punctuated with blasts of crackling guitar feedback. For the group's first album, Spooky, record label 4AD tapped Cocteau Twin Robin Guthrie, who had previously worked with the group on the Mad Love EP. As on that EP, Guthrie brought to the the table the sort of shimmering pearly dewdrops drops that made his group's catalogue glow so brightly.

Ciao! has succeeded in culling the best songs from the admittedly mish-mash collection. Often times, Spooky is awash in ridiculous Guthrie overproduction. But on a handful of tracks like the four included on Ciao! it's easy to see why 4AD brought these forces together. "For Love" was the group's best single after "Sweetness and Light," and the splendidly detached vocals of the shimmering break-up anthem "Untogether" perfectly capture the "Why are we/ bothering/ What was it we talked about?" boredom that often follows the "let's be friends" breakup.

Lush didn't put together its best album, however, until after it had ditched Guthrie in favor of über-producer Alan Moulder (My Bloody Valentine, Jesus & Mary Chain, Nine Inch Nails, Depeche Mode, Smashing Pumpkins, Moby and others). Split, which came out in 1994, catches the band at the height of its powers.

The overly sweet, floaty melodies of Spooky crop up less on Split, and the rhythm section takes over on more than a few occasions. The Berenyi-penned "Hypocrite" packs the bitter venom hinted at in the group's pre-Guthrie singles, while "When I Die" shows Anderson's lyric-writing hitting a new peak. Much of the subject matter is fairly typical boy-girl-relationship stuff, but the group's songwriting maturity and increasing musical cohesiveness and skill, not to mention Moulder's steady hand on the mixing board, led to the group's producing its most clearly honed work and one of the top records of the past 10 years.

It's not surprising, then, that Split is better represented on Ciao! than any other Lush release, with six songs and one Split-era B-side (a wonderful take on The Gist's "Love at First Sight") dominating the album's first half. By comparison, Lovelife, which is actually named for a song on Split, boasts only four.

The group's final album was a disappointing venture, but Ciao! collects all four singles from the album, including the car-themed "500 (Shake Baby Shake)," as well as the group's biggest MTV hit, "Ladykillers." Ironically, "Ladykillers" was the song Berenyi penned sarcastically out of frustration at the commercial failure of Split, which puzzlingly failed to sell nearly as well as Spooky. Blatantly poppy and featuring a 4/4 beat, handclaps and a too-often repeated chorus, it's as catchy as "Mmm...Bop" and is a great way to lead off Ciao! which, unlike most retrospectives, starts with the end and finishes with the beginning.

In the end, or the beginning, as fate would have it, we're left with a rock-solid introductions to one of the best unsung pop bands of the '90s. Lush called it quits after Lovelife and drummer Chris Acland's suicide ensured the group would never get back together, but Ciao! Best of Lush, one of the few Greatest Hits-type compilations I'll recommend, ensures the foursome will live perhaps awhile longer in the hearts of new fans.

— Eric Wittmershaus (ericw at flakmag dot com)