SOFT CELL The Very Best Of Soft Cell (Mercury/Some Bizarre)

Why exactly does the world need another Soft Cell compilation? There have already been two attempts at anthologising the band's hits, as well as an exhaustive triple CD trawl through their 12" singles and at least one budget best of (the kind of product that explains its low price by omitting "Tainted Love" in favour of vast quantities of apparently randomly selected album tracks).

Despite its initially unpromising premise, "The Very Best Of Soft Cell" just about justifies its existence, being about as crammed as a single CD could expect to be. Its emergence now is particularly apposite for several reasons. With Electroclash poised to be the next big thing in dance music (and if it isn't there'll be a lot of red-faced record company employees and music journalists!) this album instructively demonstrates how Marc Almond and Dave Ball had the whole genre sewn up decades ago. Secondly, Soft Cell's reformation finally reaches some kind of concrete fruition here, with the premiere of two new tracks of 21^st century vintage. This thoughtfully compiled compilation also picks enough material from outside the band's three proper studio albums to render it interesting even to the existing fan. And, as if it matters, these songs are still as fantastic as when I first heard them 20 years ago, when it seemed that every other band on "Top Of The Pops" was a synth duo with a Revox.

Here we get the tacky, gritty electro of "Memorabilia" and the planet-straddling Northern soul cover "Tainted Love", of course. "Bedsitter" remains one of the most concise evocations of urban alienation yet written, the song the Pet Shop Boys have spent an entire career failing to better. "Say Hello, Wave Goodbye" is rescued from David Gray cover hell (the best thing that can be said about his version is that he makes the song his own, i.e. as dreary and bloodless as the rest of his output), and the chucklesome camp of "Sex Dwarf" still astonishes. "Torch" brings toreador chic to the fetish club, and now we're all older and wiser it doesn't seem too far fetched to suggest the influence of Miles Davis circa "Sketches Of Spain", and "What" is all 60s girl group flounce.

From then on proceedings become darker and fractured - not without reason was the second Soft Cell album entitled "The Art Of Falling Apart" - and more than ever their music seemed to represent a toxic reaction to the highly stylised, airbrushed follies of contemporaries such as Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet. The five songs included here from that album and its successor, "This Last Night In Sodom", are the tip of a titanic iceberg of emotional degradation best left for another day, although the maniacally grinning, rocket-powered whoosh of "Soul Inside" remains one of the band's finest overlooked moments. The two new tracks sound almost exactly as might be expected: they have that familiar Soft Cell electro throb, updated with the dubious benefit of modern technology, but lack the corrosive edge of old.