Greatest Hits

Album Review

Six months after Limp Bizkit released The Unquestionable Truth, Pt. 1 to near universal apathy — which is what can happen when you release an album without any promotion — the band rushed out the compilation Greatest Hitz, a generous 17-track stroll through the past. Frankly, it's hard to imagine how this collection could have been executed better. While this may not contain anything from The Unquestionable Truth, Pt. 1 — which is actually kind of too bad, since it was a much better album than its 2003 predecessor, Results May Vary, but a cardinal rule of hits (or hitz) albums is that they should contain songs that people actually heard — it does contain every major MTV or active rock hit the group had. Two minor charting singles are MIA — 2000s "Crushed" and 2004's "Almost Over," to be precise — but anything anybody remembers is here. There's their first single, "Counterfeit"; there's "Faith," the first of their never-ending series of embarrassing covers, is here, along with their worst ("Behind Blue Eyes") and their latest (a monumentally silly medley of Mötley Crüe's "Home Sweet Home" and the Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony" — one of three new songs here — that sounds as if it were recorded alone by Fred Durst on Apple's GarageBand application); there are the big hits "Nookie," "Break Stuff," "Rollin' (Air Raid Vehicle)," "My Way," and "My Generation"; and there's "Take a Look Around," their contribution to the Mission Impossible 2 soundtrack, which is less forgettable than the three selections from Results May Vary. None of this has aged well — as a matter of fact, it's aged incredibly quickly, sounding older than alt-rock hits from the mid-'90s — but that's almost beside the point, because this does its job well, and listeners who want to have some Limp Bizkit in their collection will find this to provide them with more of what they want than any other Bizkit dizc. [Greatest Hitz was also released in a clean version, which removes Durst's many profanities.]