CDs of the week
Riaan Wolmarans
The happening dance and rave scene is also sustaining a huge CD industry, prolifically pumping out stacks of dance albums. Mercifully we’ve left the Cover Plus days of hyped-up pop hits far behind: these days you can happily groove along to quality dance music from all the various dance genres
Compilation albums make up a big percentage of new dance material. The Best Club Anthems ’99 … Ever! (Virgin) forms part of the spate of albums claiming to be the best of ’99 (as if the next six months won’t possibly produce any quality music). Still, some of the sixteen tracks on this album do deserve anthem status. The brilliant-as-ever Paul van Dyk’s track For an Angel is a highlight, but alas, the bagpipes on DJ Sakin and Friends’ Protect Your Mind will soon drive you up the wall, and they might just be padded. Another example is The Best Dance Album in the World … Ever! (Virgin). Any album which calls itself the best pop/dance/polka/whatever album in the world should be taken with a pinch of salt and maybe some tranquillizers to boot. This is not a bad attempt, though. Forty tracks spanning the commercial dance music of the Nineties – DJ Dado’s eerie X- Files, Nalin and Kane’s bouncy Beachball, Underworld’s trainstopping Born Slippy; it’s all here, with recent favourites such as Would You … ? by Touch & Go. Too bad about the tracks which seem to have been included based purely on commercial success, such as Blue Boy’s nauseating Remember Me.
Better quality can be found on Mother Mix 6 (Virgin). By now everyone knows the kind of quality dance music to expect from the Mother Mix series of CDs, and this latest offering is a proud torchbearer. Mixed by the talented DJ Paul, it will certainly keep the party going with the infectious beat of Untidy DJ’s Funky Groove, the trancy melody of Virtual Zone’s eponymously named track and other brave beats from people such as DJ Paul himself and Tony de Vit. Trance House 3 (BMG), mixed by DJ Spiro, proves the Trance House series to be something to keep your dancing eye on – like the preceding volumes, it manages to put together a wonderful dance experience, a smooth hour or so of quality rhythms. It’s got the big tunes – Paul van Dyk, ATB, Sentinel – with a few surprises: just when you thought you’d heard the last of Robert Miles, along comes the awe-inspiring Tilt’s Courtyard Mix of Children.
You might also enjoy the Dance Opera Club Edition (Virgin), featuring some lesser- known tracks from acts such as Milk Incorporated. Smoothly mixed, the album contains the type of house that keeps rave floors going until long after you should have been eating a healthy breakfast. Then there is the irritatingly commercial House Anthems 3 (BMG) – a neat collection of pretty much every played-to-death song of the past six months.
Source Direct’s Exorcise the Demons (Virgin) presents some awe-inspiring dark drum’n’bass. Jim Baker and Phil Aslet make up Source Direct, and their sound is reminiscent of that of their friends in Photek. Slip this into your CD player and switch off your mind for more than an hour of masterful rhythms.
Top DJ/producer Todd Terry has also brought out a new album titled Resolutions (Virgin). It’s an outstanding mix of anything from hip- hop to speed garage, even edging into industrial at times, making it quite a valuable addition to your CDcollection.