All Saints: All Hits (1997-2001)

(London)

RECOMMENDED

Not trying to be funny here -- this is a hugely enjoyable collection. All Saints got tagged in the U.S. as just another Europop phenom riding on the Spice Girls' coattails, but in fact they'd existed in some form since 1993 and made their debut almost simultaneously with their peers, and their music existed on a fascinating threshold between adult contemporary-leaning dance-pop and traditional bubblegum. That's what makes this such a fun and bizarre time capsule: there is seriously no two-year window that could have fostered this music except the 1997-98 limbo between Spice and the full-on teen pop explosion.

Group leader Shaznay Lewis spent much of the group's brief career at loggerheads with cofounder Melanie Blatt, and singers, management, writers (Lewis included), and label never seem to have found a careerist tactic that really gelled, even briefly like the Spice Girls. That's the only reason I can think of for the preponderance of baffling covers of the Red Hot Chili Peppers (a turgid "Under the Bridge") and Labelle (a "Lady Marmalade" that predates the Moulin Rouge! deconstruction by several years).

Drop those and you're not left with many actual tunes, but the ones here are an intriguing snapshot of a moment in time, a decent nostalgia trip, and generally just a bit of silly fun. Check out the trip-hop inflection of "Pure Shores," the TV commercial insistence of "I Know Where It's At," the stupid-delightful bounciness on "Bootie Call." Inevitably, the cut that shows real depth and longevity is the massive crossover hit, the extraordinarily melodramatic breakup ballad "Never Ever," a brilliant single that borrows equally from "Amazing Grace" and the Shangri-Las; this is a language we all can understand.

Lewis herself, who composed most of "Never Ever" in response to a messy relationship, seems to have been the foremost talent of the group (a solo cut she did with Artful Dodger makes the cut here, and sounds pretty much at home with everything else, perhaps more because of the era than anything), and she and Blatt are also apparently hilarious, if we're to trust Wikipedia's harrowing documentation of their various falling-outs:

Shaznay Lewis later explained that the catalyst for the break-up was a disagreement over who would wear a certain jacket for a photoshoot: "I would never in a million years have put money on the group ending over a jacket incident. But when that incident happened, it fired up so strong, it had to be over. And the way I was then, the state we'd got into then, there was no way she was getting that stupid jacket."

In August 2009, Melanie Blatt told the London Lite: "All Saints are never getting back together again. I never want to sing again. I recently did the Brits with Nic and we just went round chatting to people and then got drunk. That's my goal—to get paid for chatting to people and getting drunk!"

Do you ever suddenly get this feeling that nothing about pop culture will ever be as fun to you as it was when you were a teenager? I dunno... just wondering.