Matt Darey – The Very Best Of Euphoria

Certainly one of the stand-out Euphoria albums. Barely a step wrong with the tracklist...only one or two that I'd have probably left off, but they're trying to cover the bases...and leaving Zombie Nation and The Launch on there to please whatever masses still want to hear those tracks is a small price to pay for the other awesome tracks. Everything flows really well and despite having very few tracks from the early Euphorias has somehow managed to keep that nostalgic, slightly melancholy feel to the whole mix - might be down to many of the tracks being in minor keys. Despite Ferrys massive footprint on trance there seems to be only one track by him on here, and I still say these albums really really really missed a trick when it comes to getting some crazy uplifting trance from Holland on board. They had some seriously great trance that could have been included but as it's the end of 2002 for this album I don't suppose that stuff will get a look in. Nevermind. It's still a great, well mixed (in key for the most part too, which sounds nice) compilation.
Four star, could have been a little more adventurous....buuut it's a 'best of' so there we go.
Gee I hope some other company doesn't come along, buy the brand and turn it into a 'classics' series! ;)
Four star, 375/500

You can definitely count on Euphoria to deliver an excellent 'Best of' compilation. Ministry of Sound have flogged the retrospective format endlessly over the years after gaining the brand from Telstar in 2004, but this sole effort from 2002 is perhaps the most refined and lovingly compiled attempt at encapsulating those legendary years of trance anthems. Yes, there are a lot of overplayed classics on here and the gold slipcase seems very easily damaged (I've never seen one that looks like it hasn't been scratched and dented by a child with a compass and ruler), but each and every one of these tracks were massive hits both on the dancefloor and in the charts, which makes for two discs of killers, not fillers.

Matt Darey is the mastermind behind the mix, and judging by the liner notes from the Euphoria team it seems he was entrusted to do whatever he wished to make the tracks flow. Rather like Matt's debut Ibiza Euphoria, his creativity and innovation around engineering the transitions makes for a joyful experience, and in all honesty I do feel a clever digital mix can do trance a lot of justice as it is digital music for a digital age, after all. Planet Perfecto into Push is pure euphoria to my ears, whilst Matt's own remix of Binary Finary works remarkably well after Storm's Time to Burn. These are just two of the multitude of amazing transitions lovingly curated by Darey, and his passionate liner notes for each track show how into the music the guys behind this brand really were.

There's also some juicy trivia for trainspotters among Darey's notes - I'd never realised Planet Perfecto were Trouser Enthusiasts and Jake Williams from JX before buying this CD (This was before I discovered Discogs of course!). It's also interesting to hear the Euphoria team mention how they felt that there was a lack of decent material coming out at the time, presumably in reference to the summer of 2002, when trance seemed to split roughly into head-nodding underground prog and bosh bosh bosh Euro belters like Scooter and Lasgo. Within a few months, those heady days of trance would seem a lifetime ago, yet once again Euphoria had their fingers on the pulse and were able to deliver one final mix to sum up the previous three years of the genre. If you're after a definitive retrospective of that oh-so perfect era of the greatest dance genre there ever was, I think this may well be it.

Apparently they did a limited 2000 copy run of this album, that had a much brighter gold slipcase.

Anyone come across this before??