- Reviewing a greatest hits fills me with the bad feelings, let's get that out of the way right at the start; but we don't have a huge amount of Australian content that's coming out this week to talk about and Oztralia's own Sia Furler is such a curious pop oddity this might be worth a look in. Actually, it's even worse in some ways: This best of appears hot on the heels of Sia's laconic farewell tweet: “hi. i'm not touring or doing appearances or being in videos or doing interviews anymore. i like to be behind the scenes for now. cheerio!” Five seconds later the panicky record company spews out a greatest hits before everyone forgets who she is. Even the title: Best Of, dot, dot, dot. It just smacks of, 'well this is the end, what more do you want, huh?' Dive into said record at any point, however, and it's impossible to feel cheesed off, all I have is a guilty feeling for smiling so dopily at every memory I get to relive of Sia's pitch-perfect pop songwriting. I've always been a bit bemused by Sia's career-arc. As a snobby elitist I knew there was going to be a point where I'd have to foreswear all enjoyment and potentially even ever having enjoyed the work of Sia. As she soared to number one and stayed there for a year I'd quietly excuse myself and go back to stuffing ear-shredding artrock into my head. Only it never seemed to happen. Sia, I think, was a bit bemused too. Bemused would be putting it mildly, actually. P-O'd would probably be more accurate. Consistently writing club bangers, delicious pop, doing collab.s with fabulously cool and famous people and getting her songs noticed in all sorts of places just wasn't making her the kind of success she was after and she parted ways with a number of under-performing labels. On this record you can hear some of the stuff she was doing back in that period, up to about 2007: the jazz-poppy Where I belong or the haunting Breathe Me which played over the closing credits to the final ever episode of Six Feet Under. Damn, she just does some cool stuff. She was also the voice of Zero Seven for a number of years, which really keyed into her past as a triphopper - check out their hit single, Destiny. The success did come, as I new it would, but in a quite unexpected way. Sia created it almost to spite the succession of fantastic pop-singles off her 2010 album 'We Are Born' - Clap Your Hands, You've Changed, Bring Night, etc. - as they climbed up Australian charts but stubbornly refused to break outside the country - I guess a swag of ARIA awards are a poor consolation. From 2007 Sia hooked up with Christina Aguilera and just wrote a bunch of tracks on her 2010 album Bionic. Christina obviously enjoyed the experience and recommended her to all the other famous she knew. There's a bunch of stuff out there with folks like Flo Rida and Madonna. Is it wrong of me to be pleased that the Flo Rida track didn't make it on the record? Oh well, there's that Titanium thing she did with David Guetta if you want to slum it. I guess songwriting for uninspired famous people (aren't there a lot of them?) is what she'll be doing 'behind the scenes'. She did have a brush with Grave's Disease, which causes hyperthyroidism and symptoms like an enormous goitre - yikes! How insensitive of me, but I wonder if that has something to do with this, or if she just finally had her fill of the crappy pop industry? You could hardly blame her, really, and I never did get to the point where I had to stop listening to her. She remains one of my favourite guilty pop pleasures. I think I'll miss those videos she's refusing to do any more of, the most. No-one does zany dress-up quite like Sia. Y'know, I've really talked myself into this Best Of... Well, it wasn't very hard.

- Chris Cobcroft.