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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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