The Very Best of Deee-Lite

Album Review

Deee-Lite is often seen as a one-hit wonder, albeit a brilliant one hit; the phenomenal "Groove Is in the Heart" is one of those great, giddy pleasures that defined a time and transcended it. The thing is, that wasn't the end of the Deee-Lite story, even if it was undeniably their chart pinnacle, because their dizzy, ironically hippified second-summer-of-love dance music was overflowing with delights: sonic thrills from DJ Towa Tei and DJ Dmitry and clever sexiness from Lady Miss Kier. This was most evident on their mini-classic debut, World Clique, but their next two albums had their merits, and all of them are featured on Rhino's fine 20-track collection, The Very Best of Dee-Lite. This understandably relies very heavily on the debut, with seven selections, grazing over Infinity Within with four cuts before settling in for no less than nine songs from the underrated 1994 swan song, Dewdrops in the Garden. This doesn't have the sustained thrills of World Clique, but it does make a convincing case that the group was consistently entertaining and inventive, thereby winding up as a first-class summary of thrilling band.