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While the Greatest Hits release from Spoken features an impressive assortment of songs from the group's first three albums, it is perhaps equally important as a documentary of the Arkansan quintet's ever-shifting musical leanings over the course of its five year history.  The band's self-titled 1996 indie debut and its major-label follow-up, 1997's On Your Feet, showed the band in its budding stages.  While the group's characteristically enthusiastic musical backing and frenetic rapped vocals were evident even at this point, the music of the first two albums was an oftentimes derivative reproduction of the funk-inflected rap-metal of mainstream artists like the Deftones and, more particularly, Rage Against the Machine.  In much the same way, the lyrics to a large number of the songs, such as the title track and "Stupid People" (Stupid people/ Where you gonna go/ Stupid people/ Don't you have a soul), leaned heavier on cliche' than originality in order to make their points.

1999's What Remains was a transition album of sorts that found the group retaining the rapped vocal work and frenzied funk-driven backing of On Your Feet while adding a more pronounced bottom end together with a sludgier set of guitar textures that nudged the band's sound a bit closer to post-grunge terrain.  Wordwise, entries like "People Get Ready ... Jesus is Coming," an imposing thrash rework of the Crystal Lewis classic with Jyro Xhan of Fold Zandura, and "Fly With Me," an authoritative rapcore/hip-hop hybrid featuring labelmates K2S, showed the band's distinctively evangelistic lyrical slant still intact.  By 2000's Echoes of the Spirit Still Dwell, the band had all but forsaken the rapped vocals of the first effort and nudged the post-grunge stylings of What Remains even further towards the alternative-influenced metal of bands like Helmet and Tool.  The band's musicianship, too, was ratcheted up from previous efforts with entries such as "A Question Alone" and "Forevermore" showing an increased attention to complex time signatures and intricate guitar lines.  And songs like "David" (O God, let your spirit fall on me/ Your perfect peace comes down and amazes me) pointed to the album's shift from the world-directed evangelistic outlook of the first two efforts towards a more introspective, and often confessional, point of view.

As it stands, the Greatest Hits release offers a fine overview of the Spoken catalog, gathering each of the songs above, together with seven others, for the ample 14-track collection.  The compilation does tend to favor latter-day releases, with nearly half of its entries coming from the Echoes album while On Your Feet is represented by only three cuts.  But, if such a line-up is less than equitable towards the band's earlier output, it nonetheless works best in terms of album quality given that the tracks from Echoes are the most fully realized in terms of both musical and lyrical quality.  For those most acquainted with the band, the anthology probably doesn't offer anything they don't already own and, certainly, the inclusion of live, demo or unreleased tracks would have made the package more attractive to die-hard fans.  For the casual listener, however, the Greatest Hits release offers a solid sampling of the estimable Spoken catalog as well as an intriguing look into the band's impressive sonic metamorphosis over the course of its first five years together.

Bert Gangl  10/28/2001