Right then…

Let’s make no bones about it, Tiesto’s statistics in dance music (particularly trance) is for the most part pretty solid. Regardless of what your feelings are on this guy’s output he has a devoted following, he’s played to 250,000 on a beach in Rio De Janeiro, he played to 110,000 people at Privilege in Ibiza as well as headlining festivals across Europe.

Now that we’ve got the credentials out of the way, lets look at his new album ‘Kaleidscope’ which is out on October 5th. It’s Tiesto’s fourth studio album and contains a hefty seventeen tracks to take us on a musical journey (fucking hell, I’d best go to the toilet first then). There’s also a raft of guest stars on this release as well, which means a) it might be interesting b) he could take a lot of people down with him.

Musically there are no surprises here at all. You pretty much know what you are getting from the outset. Monster synths, that move not with a sensuous shimmer but alas more like Godzilla wandering about in downtown Tokyo. The beats are for the most part leaden and for the most part the tracks on offer just don’t seem to invite any emotional response from the listener and surely that’s what you want from your dance music, right?

Collaborations with the likes of Jonsi from Sigur Ros and Kele Okereke from Bloc Party are largely forgettable and seem only to exist to draw in listeners from outside Tiesto’s own genre. In fact for the most part the guest vocalists who possess a strident sense of their own identity in their own right are reduced to interchangeable identikit performers when they are lined up here.

Even Calvin Harris who after crawling from the wreckage of his own recent bad reviews (a tad unfair they were as well I felt) doesn’t seem to be able to place his stamp on the proceedings and his collaboration ‘Century’ slides seamless into the mire that it shares with the other tracks that are on offer.

There is a buoyant moment however and it comes from Tiesto’s work with Tegan & Sarah (‘Feel It In My Bones’). You might wonder who they are (check out Morgan Page’s gorgeous bootleg of their track ‘Walking With A Ghost’ for an introduction) but for this track everything actually loosens up a little and the results are a vocal that flows nicely over the slightly less oppressive synths, this could be the album’s high watermark.

Elsewhere Nelly Furtado cruises through her offering with what seems like an air of disinterest, maybe she’s trying to play it cool with a vocal that wants to smoulder but when you run this next to what she has done with the likes of Timbaland sadly it doesn’t compare.

The album begins to limp to the finish as it runs out of collaborators with Emily Haynes (from Metric….I mean for God’s sake she gave us ‘Monster Hospital’) being the final insurgent. She sings of high hopes but sadly by this point all mine are dashed and the glacial emotionless synths are starting to wear me down. The second to last track ‘Louder Than Boom’ does have some quite nice sounds on it though and it shows that Tiesto has been listening to the odd chiptune as his arpeggiations have that retro burble and there’s quite a nice build going on but it doesn’t quite hit the mark.

The closer ‘Surrounded By Light’ is meant to represent the afterglow, the beats are gone and we are left bathed in ambient washes and pianos which morph ever so slowly into strings. In metaphorical terms Tiesto doubtless wants us to think this is our majestic post coital moment. But the truth be told, he’s the guy who went in hard and blew his stack too early, and you’re the one left sleeping in the wet spot.

Unforgivably dull.