Armand Van Helden is a pretty revered figure in house music, I guess. I like EDM a lot, but I know very little about all the genre breakdowns that fall under that incredibly broad label. But I take it that this is house music and it’s an album that clocks in at just under seventy-five minutes, so it’s a CD about as packed as CDs get. Anyway, knowing as little as I do about EDM, I was wondering if I’d be able to tell the difference between good and bad when it came to this kind of thing; I like the big beat and the deep bass and, beyond that, I wondered, would I be able to really tell what was good and what wasn’t? Well, yes, I could because I instantly recognized that the album opener, the nearly ten minute Mother Earth, which features wailing, pretentious vocals about the environment, was pretty bad. Luckily, things picked up immediately with the cheesy, but delightful Boogie Monster. And the rest of the album was really great. It really is just high-energy dance music that doesn’t really ever lose the drive and the energy. I really liked the menacingly tinged Alienz and the strange Necessary Evil, which had a riff built around a very strange metallic sample that almost sounded like a buzzsaw. Entra Mi Casa is also worth a mention; I’m typically not a fan of “sexy” tracks where a woman moans erotically over an instrumental bed, but darned if this one isn’t really hot. Kudos to vocalist Mita on this one. My favorite track though was definitely Summertime, the mellowest track on the album, a really cool, kind of laid back cover of the old standard. The bass-line on that track is just this luxurious vibe, pure gold really. I don’t know that there’s a whole lot to SAY about music like this; but I really loved it. Even with tracks that stretched to ten minutes and a total running time of almost an hour-and-fifteen minutes, this album just kept the energy up and it was just a good time every time I listened to it. This is a party and even though that opener isn’t very good, well, there’s still over an hour of truly excellent dance music after that one’s over, so I’m not even mad. 4 stars.
tl;dr – a disappointing opening track doesn’t detract much from an overall excellent, high-energy epic-length EDM album that delivers a gold-star level party every time you put it on. 4 stars.