Nick Bracegirdle, who records under the name Chicane, has a strong pop sense to go with his taste for ambient and trance dance tracks. For one thing, he always employs simple but catchy melodies over his repetitious beats, and for another he cleverly hooks up with some established names looking to extend their appeal into the dance field. "Saltwater," heard here in two different mixes, is a dance treatment of the old Clannad hit "Theme from Harry's Game" (best known in the U.S. for its appearance in a car commercial), complete with Clannad lead singer Maire Brennan. And "Don't Give Up," also heard in two different versions, one of which is a hidden track at the end of the disc, features vocals by Bryan Adams, not that you're likely to recognize him the first time through. When he isn't heating up the dance floor with unlikely guests, Bracegirdle constructs spacy ambient tracks that cool things down, the first of which, "Overture," sounds like something left off a Pink Floyd album from the 1970s. Despite international success, the American popularity of this album is likely to be limited to clubs. Not that Americans don't like European dance novelties, but they tend to like them to be more obvious, like Eiffel 65.
© William Ruhlmann /TiVo