Electro-funk! New age balladry! Nu metal throat shredding! It’s all here! For most of these 13 tracks, the Godfather of Epic abandons the dancefloor faithful and just whacks away at that piñata. Sure, Movement had its own piñata moments - “Madskillz-Mic Chekka” and “Love on Haight Street” and whatnot - but for the most part BT stuck to his strengths, and there were more than enough glorious moments to make up for the self-indulgent lapses. And the thing is, as much as trance in general and epic trance in particular has been rightly maligned for its sappiness and formulaic builds and breakdowns in the years since, BT was good at it - and continued to be good at it right up until his last album Movement in Still Life, which in “Mercury and Solace” and “Godspeed” had possibly his two best contributions to the genre.

But I’ll save that for another rambling album review).

When BT first burst onto the dance music scene in the mid-’90s, he was one of the pioneers of a style that eventually became known as epic trance, or dream trance, or, some would argue, just trance (Which is ridiculous, by the way - BT and Sasha didn’t invent trance any more than Chuck Berry and Elvis invented rock ‘n’ roll - they took existing sounds and, thanks to their immense talents, pushed them from the underground into the mainstream. It’s obviously great fun for BT, who makes it clear in his press kit and liner notes that he spent thousands of hours in the studio geeking out over this stuff (6,178 vocal edits in one track! Sample-accurate, nano-corrected rain! grain synthesis algorithmic work, whatever the hell that is!), but for those of us who have to listen to it, it’s not exactly nourishing stuff. Another gumdrop of hip-hop, another nugget of techno, another lozenge of rock. With each “thwack!” of his admittedly brilliant but increasingly overblown production skills, another morsel of dance pop spills out. But BT doesn’t so much push the envelope on his new album as he does whack at it like a piñata, trying to see what musical goodies will spill out of it next. Far be it from me or any critic to trash an artist for pushing the envelope.

Simply being loved by bt