Boys Noize 'Power' (Boys Noize) Released 05/10/09

As album titles go, Alexander Ridha’s 2007 debut Oi Oi Oi couldn’t have been more appropriate. The music contained within was thick, brash and often deliberately and joyously unsubtle – in short, a perfect fit for the prevailing dance mood of the time. Justice were breaking into the charts with a relatively fresh signature sound, the rest of the Ed Banger crew were in full flow, and Boys Noize’s hard-edged Daft Punk-isms chased the zeitgeist to perfection. ‘Let’s Buy Happiness’ in particular was a dancefloor killer – and remains so to this day – a thrashed out opening riff that abruptly parted halfway through to reveal a monstrous melodic breakdown before a swooping drop took it skyward.

Two years is a long time in dance music: fast forward to 2009, and the blog-house phenomenon that burned so brightly appears to have receded somewhat, with the trend towards slowed-down, aggressive electro replaced by bassline-influenced ‘fidget’ house and increasingly ubiquitous one-dimensional wobble-step. The real challenge for Ridha’s follow-up Power is presented by an internet saturated with legions of soundalike but vastly inferior copycat producers. It would have been almost too easy to write his second album off without ever having properly listened to it.

A large proportion of 'Power' is, inevitably, made up of large-scale, big room tunes, which suffer for the transition to album format. Ridha remains a fantastic DJ, with excellent taste and a flair for subtlety at appropriate moments, but the art of a great DJ set is quite unlike the art of sequencing an album. There are a number of tracks that far exceed the realms marked simply ‘competent’, but over the course of an entire full-length the overall effect is one of diminishing returns through overexposure. The 12” remains arguably the genre’s perfect format.

Paradoxically then, 'Power’s most exciting moments arrive when the influence of Ridha’s Berlin base rears its head most overtly and he turns down the effects unit marked ‘loud and hard’ – the grinding minimalism of ‘Nerve’ and the cavernous, dubbed out bass pressure of ‘Rozz Box’ in particular. Surprisingly, there’s even a bit of London rudeness in the runaway carnival ride atmosphere and soca-influenced UK funky percussion of ‘Drummer’. Nonetheless, it remains – as so many dance albums do – a record made up of individual tracks as opposed to a fulfilling full-length listen in its own right.