As far as house music goes, it’d be hard to find a bigger name than Swedish House Mafia.
Despite announcing the end of their collective career earlier this year, Sebastian Ingrosso, Steve Angello and Axwell opted to leave the industry with a 22 track compilation album as a parting gift.
The record plays like a club set, mixed seamlessly to allow listeners to experience the anthology in the appropriate electronic dance music style.
Opening with ‘Greyhound’ (released in correlation with Absolut Vodka as a marketing tool in March this year,) it’s immediately obvious that any faults on this record will not be found in its production.
Mixed at a quality designed for deep sound systems, featuring superb isolation and flawless frequency ranging. Sub-basses are weighty and resonate; while punchy and warm kicks underpin biting snares and pad samples, all the while snaps and stabs sparkle across the higher frequencies.
Make no mistake however, the trio in no way revolutionise the dance genre, sticking pretty close to comfortable, commercial styles, grouping 16 bar loops, long atmospheric builds and clever but predictable drops.
Over the course of the tracklist some of the rudimentary patterns and inherent faults in this anthology begin to reveal themselves.
Playing the first 10 seconds of ‘Beating Of My Heart’, ‘Raise Your Head/ Epic’, ‘In My Mind (Axwell Mix)’, or others, they all begin with an almost identical opening sequence.
All of which, after a number of listens, serves to undermine any credibility the mix seemed to initially posses. Yes, it works flawlessly, but ultimately the record begins to sound unexciting to the point of banal.
Until Now conveys this mixed message throughout the sum of it’s parts, standing as both a textbook example of the competency and talent for production that still forms the bedrock of the European house syndicate, which Swedish House Mafia dominated, while at the same time demonstrating the overused and tryingly formulaic approach plaguing commercial dance music in recent times.
A hugely lucrative final instalment for the Swedish juggernauts, but it also appears as just another drop in the ocean of predictably common commercial house music.
