Adapt or Die is an oddly petulant title for a collection of re-mixes. It is almost cynical, suggesting that the root of musical innovation is a Darwinian struggle for presence and relevance in the market. This is the stuff of some artists -- Damien Hirst and Andy Warhol come to mind -- but Everything But the Girl was a band that always stood for tortured sincerity, notorious in their early years for lyrics like: "I was desperate for love to be pure/What that meant, I never was sure/You spent your time on me/I took it willingly/And I made you trust in literature."

That track, "Walking to You" was on the breakthrough/transition album Amplified Heart. Amplified brought the smash that changed everything: "Missing". Although they later recorded a song called "Lullaby of Clubland," "Missing" was better deserves the title: it was an inescapable soundtrack to two or three summers worth of my nocturnal misadventures in London and New York in the mid-1990s. Its massive success, along with the success of EBTG's Tracey Thorn's guest vocals on Massive Attack's "Better Things," transformed EBTG from a singer-songwriter acousticy kind of act to the sure-footed masters of the electronica realm. It is this legacy in dance music that is tracked on this most recent of compilations, which makes only a single nod to their acoustic roots, on which, defiantly enough, it appears as the final track. They may have adapt to the musical marketplace, but as one lyric puts it "The mind may grow wise/ but the heart sulks and whines and remains a child."

I long ago realized that I would never tire of "Missing," but I was surprised by how great some of the lesser hits still sound. "Temperamental" is a highlight, and the only mis-step is the faux-bossa nova of "Corcovado." The re-mixes I like the best are ones that do not try to re-imagine the song so much as sound like alternate takes, which take a song you still essentially like but have grown weary of hearing the same note-for-note recording. For the most part, this is that sort of album; all the songs are recognizable and for the most part began as electronica in the first place (with the exception of "Rollercoaster", which is also an exception to my rule, in being a "reimagined" song that has changed my mind about the original.)