(405 Recordings/Stomp)

Pay attention! Class is about to start.

Ferry Corsten remains one of the few teachers left in the school of traditional trance; more and more of the genre is being mashed with techno, prog or electro, yet Corsten continues to create more of the pure sounds in the genre. Twice In A Blue Moon goes one step further than previous albums – he’s thrown out a lot of the nonsense heard in LEF and smoothed a lot of the harsh (and criminally over-compressed) edges that seem to plague the clubs; the melodies still leap out, but not how you’d usually think. Instead of an unnecessarily huge lead drowning out everything except the pumped percussion, Corsten tightens the drums and layers silky synths one after the other. The mix is absolute class; everything is placed perfectly, allowing the listener to catch it all. The downside of this approach is that the album in often sounds like the Sunday at home eating brunch (or doing laundry, if you’re like me) instead of the Saturday night tearing strips off the dancefloor. Save for perhaps Shanti and lead single Radio Crash, very little will probably smash clubland – others, like Brain Box, carry LEF-like qualities, and while they’re not as self-indulgent, they are still able to wake the listener in between the dreamy pads in surrounding tracks. The effort that has been put into this record will probably be lost on most of trance’s attention-deficit fans, though purists would probably agree that this is the year’s most accomplished trance album.

***½

SCOTT HARMS

Be first to comment on this article

Write Comment
Comments are submitted for possible publication on the condition that they may be edited. Poster's IP addresses are logged.
Name:
Comment:
Code:*