Best Of

Discounting one-hit wonders Ladies First and Sweet Female Attitude, Mis-Teeq were the only girl group to embrace the garage scene that dominated the charts in the early noughties. It was a sound which set them apart from the plethora of girl bands around at the start of the noughties and helped them to score two platinum albums, several MOBO and Brit Award nominations, and eight consecutive Top 20 hits, all of which are included here for the first time. Owing their success just as much to remixers Sunship, who transformed their original, watered down, derivative R&B into bouncy two-step pop, the likes of "Why," "All I Want," and "Be with Me" also benefit from Alesha Dixon's humorous and effortlessly cool, quickfire MC skills. But when they strayed from this formula, they became very ordinary indeed. "One Night Stand" was a plodding attempt at Rodney Jerkins-style R&B, "Roll On" could have been lifted from any '90s Sisters of Swing compilation, and their cover of Montell Jordan's classic "This Is How We Do It" was as pointless as it was banal. By the time of second album Eye Candy, they'd abandoned their garage roots altogether. At first, their new direction worked. "Scandalous," with its bubbling acidic basslines and wailing sirens, is undoubtedly their finest hour and one of the best girl band singles of the decade. But second single "Can't Get It Back" sounded like a Destiny's Child B-side, and apart from the Pet Shop Boys sampling "Style," they sounded like a band who'd run out of ideas. Of course, any Greatest Hits compiled from just two studio albums will be guilty of padding. Strangely, none of the six album tracks included are from their far superior debut Lickin' on Both Sides while the only new track, "Shoo Shoo Baby," a cover of the Andrews Sisters standard, is an unexpected and quite frankly bizarre swan song. So an unnecessary and inconsistent compilation it may be, but there are enough flashes of pop brilliance here to cement their reputation as one of Britain's best R&B girl bands. ~ Jon O'Brien, Rovi