Various – Gatecrasher: Digital

Well, I hope they're proud (Haha). I bought this at the time of release and it's basically the reason I stopped buying any more CDs.
I'll start off with the positives. CD3 is brilliant. Whilst many of the ambient tracks had already featured on the Chilled Euphorias there are a couple of gems here and some you won't hear anywhere else (Charlie May - Vorab). The mix itself is pretty standard and most tracks are left to play out. The only downside to the mix is the inclusion of that awful Moby remix with the creepy baby crying in it. Not at all chilled. Man this would have been a 100%er chilled CD if they hadn't done that. A shame. Anyway, one track, easy to skip. This CD is a 4 star. The others....well..not so much.
CD1 is 'fine' although it's fairly boring in places, but never boring enough to make you go 'ugh ffs' and skip the track. It's much more 'tech' than the previous progressive mixes. Just nothing exciting enough or thoughtful enough to make me want to go back to it.
So I didn't. This must be the first time I've listened to it in 20 years.
CD2 is just pointless if you're into trance, it's full of the kind of hard trance that appeared *between* the good eras - so all that nice mid-90s german hard trance...No, it's not that. All that melodious uplifting fast and hard-guyvery-tidy-two stuff? No it's not that.
It's that weird slow, hard kick, fart bass stuff that was around for about 2 years before evolving and either becoming hardstyle or nu skool hard trance. Very little uplifting or melodious stuff here. Just either tech-trance monotony, or boring clang sounds with a farty bass.
There are a few good pieces on here...errr..Maximizing The Audience is great, though sounds distinctly like Quicksilvers - Ameno and the final track Electronic Technology. I used to skip to that one a fair bit before it became boring putting a CD in for just one track.
Airwave is such an amazing producer and has some of the best trance ever written under his belt...but wow V-Two - Progressive Future is shockingly boring. It's literally the same chord all the way through.

So yeah, after this CD I never spent another £15.99 on a trance album, I was done. It wasn't worth the risk for another let down. I'd rather spend the money on 3 slabs of vinyl, which is what I did. For me 2001 was still pre-internet days and I just assumed (wrongly) that trance had had its moment. I guess in a way though I was correct at least when it came to the euphoric Ferry Corsten-esc euro trance sound.

At least I do not regret the chillout CD.
Interested to hear where Gatecrasher took it after this..
3stars, but if it hadn't been for that chillout CD it'd have been a 2 star, possibly a 1.

Even amongst die-hard trance fans I find it hard to believe that anyone who enjoyed the first half of the first CD would also enjoy the second half of the second CD (or vice versa). However, I never went to Gatecrasher, so perhaps it really was a total mishmash of hard dance styles.