Presenting three CDs worth of label holdings, this compilation largely restricts itself to material issued by Ninja Tune in the five years leading up to its release (the earliest inclusion comes from 1998, with nothing from the eight years of the label’s existence before that making an appearance).  The set serves up pieces of alternative pop, conscious hip-hop, amped-up breakbeat, jazzy leftfield, pop rap, electrofunk, and a bevy of other niche and cross-pollinated styles, with over forty artists, plus dozens of guests and remixers, shown off over the three hours and change of its run-time.

Unsurprisingly, most of the picks are tunes which had been deemed worthy of being put out as a single, due to catchiness, especially strong beats, or whatever other factors, so there’s a fairly strong base-line to the quality of the music.  Production values are high, with a warehouse’s worth of synths, drum machines, and samples put to work, while the turntable antics associated with the label’s founders, Coldcut (who get in a few tracks of their own), get much less exposure than might be expected.

There’s no apparent division or theming between the three discs (titled, respectively, “You”, “Don’t”, and “Know”), aside from the second having a lot of heavy lyrical repetition, which seems like a bit of a wasted opportunity for running the tracks in chronological (or even alphabetical) order, or breaking it into groups of the most similarly-styled tracks.  Despite that, there’s a good flow to each, and to the compilation as a whole, so it’s not much of a fault, just weirdly directionless for such a large collection.  And though that bulkiness does make diving into the fifty songs a little off-putting, it also gives a nice cross-section of Ninja Tunes’ styles at the time, so in the end, it does all that it was meant to do.