Noel Sanger
Ritual
Sunrise Recordings/Strictly Hype
Complete with the prerequisite, grooving bass lines and keyboard squelches of your everyday trance music, Mr. Sanger’s epic trance mix on Ritual combines these essential elements with his own turntable trickery. It’s good to see Noel dug a bit deeper in the crates to find relatively more obscure artists, like Memmon, Incisions and Planet Heaven, than your big name blokes and their overplayed club anthems. But don’t worry, Hybrid’s remix of BT’s “Never Gonna Come Back Down” makes an appearance, as it has on every other dance compilation released in the past few months. Besides that slip into monotony, the record is pretty much on par with its intentions of getting the clubgoers to break it down.
Along with American trance colleague Christopher Lawrence, Sanger has revitalized this genre and imported the English beat onto our floors, like a fine, aged wine. But this mix isn’t the cream of the crop. It tends to fall flat at times, and the production isn’t quite up to other Sanger productions, but if you don’t really care and just want shake ya ass, turn the volume up. This Ritual will be practiced by your tribe.