One of the prominent sounds in dance music at the moment is Dutch trance. Now as the Dutch are quite hot on their cheese you'd think that's a dodgy combination, but rest assured it isn't - Ferry Corsten, along with DJ Tiesto and Armin Van Buuren, is heading a scene of quality music, towering riffs and driving bass lines.

Corsten has a lot of previous, too - in 1999 his Out Of The Blue track, under the System F moniker, rocked many a dancefloor. He managed to follow this up effectively with the more introspective Cry, whilst securing remix duties for Moby and William Orbit.

Right Of Way is his first full length release on Positiva, and whilst a long album it contains some excellent, full-on trance tunes - the obvious example being the pumping single Rock You Body Rock, the vocoder sample a treat and the main tune sounding like a highway dash on an arcade game.

What makes Corsten's record satisfying is the lack of fillers, for Right Of Way is a driving hands in the air tune, Whatever! is a curious electro beast with some unusual lyrics and a big, big bass line, and Holding On revisits the 303 sound of the early '90s, paying a bit of homage to Corsten's remix of Adagio For Strings along the way.

Unfortunately the two down-tempo tracks, although they work in the sense that the driving tempo is broken, are woolly at best. Sweet Sorrow ends up as a melancholy, rather sugary plodder, and Skindeep fares little better. The closing In My Dreams reminded me of Way Out West's classic The Gift, that is until the lyric kicked in: "I have a vision of two people fusing." Dare I say it, a bit of a short fuse!

Enough of the negatives, though, as it's clear Corsten's more at ease on the floor and has plenty of weapons at his disposal, while not being afraid to delve into breakbeat and electro now and then. This works really well on songs like It's Time where he plays around with the rhythm a bit, and the lyrical tongue-twister that is Show Your Style.

Good trance albums don't come along very often, so this one deserves to be snapped up at the earliest opportunity. Not only that, but unusually for a dance album it gets better with every listen. Not much Edam here!

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