Back in 1995, you could barely walk down a London street without stumbling over a male/female electronic duo. It's often forgotten that though Britpop was famous for its sixties yearnings, as embodied by Oasis, it also helped nudge real experimentalism towards the mainstream under the awkward label 'trip hop'.
Lamb were briefly one of the most lauded pioneers of the movement, despite lacking Portishead's sonic ingenuity, Sneaker Pimps' slinkiness or Moloko's playfulness. Lamb's main problem was that they were a bit boring, a problem which couldn't be fixed by innovation alone. That just made them boring with strange squelchy sounds.
Early material such as "Gorecki" and "Cotton Wool" are characterized by bold drum loops, sparse atmospherics and abrupt shifts in tempo, but such intriguing qualities are smothered by the cloying folksiness of Louise Rhodes' vocals, always so high in the mix it felt like her tongue was jammed in your ear. In an unpleasant way.
Later years saw them achieve a more harmonious sound, with the wistful, lovelorn "Wonder" and the brooding "Stronger" seeing Rhodes reign in her more coy folkisms whilst Andrew Barlow's dubby, dense noises seemed to flex with the tunes rather than against them. But, it must be said, "Best Kept Secrets" is a rather poor testament to an eight-year career, filled with well-crafted, forgettable nothings like "One" and "Angelica".
And yet, and yet. It's often claimed that every band has at least one great single in them. Lamb's was the oddball "B Line", and it still sounds so good it justifies the price of this compilation alone. Its verses creep up on you, drenched in slightly menacing, very sexy Badalamenti jazz, before its sudden lurch into a huge, unhinged chorus. Horns blast, drum loops hammer, weird sludgy techno churns and Louise Rhodes ecstatically yodels "I go ba! da! be! da! be! da! da! when you're close to me." Improbably, it's extraordinary.
But, for the most part, these secrets are probably best kept.
