Best Of: I Can't Imagine World Without Me

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For a brief time in the heady early days of Brit-pop, Echobelly seemed like serious contenders. Their blend of the Smiths, Blondie, and indie rock was hooky, assured, stylish, and sexy, and songs like "I Can't Imagine the World Without Me" and "Insomniac" were bracing singles that suggested their full-length would be a corker. And it was pretty close to that -- Everybody's Got One is one of the solid Brit-pop efforts, a brash collection of swagger and tunes that sounded great when surrounded played next to other debuts of similarly inclined bands. Echobelly had a hard time maturing, though, stumbling on its nevertheless pleasing second effort before trailing off into the sunset. The 18-track collection I Can't Imagine the World Without Me: The Best of Echobelly traces that rise and fall all too accurately by giving equal credence to all eras of the band, when it would have been a better idea to skew it toward the first two records. There are still some very, very good singles to be heard here, and it's nice to have them collected, but the unevenness of the material is jarring, especially when you know that great songs like "Car Fiction" were overlooked (OK, that was included in a French version, but that just accentuates the absence of the original). An accurate sampler, then, but not as definitive as the debut. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine