VARIOUS JBO A Perspective (Junior Boy’s Own)

One of no doubt many releases to come over the next few months designed to assist in the celebrations surrounding a decade of acid house, this four album box set attempts to put a little perspective spin on proceedings. Besides documenting the rise and rise of one of the dance scene’s most forward thinking labels (the people who first brought the world The Chemical Brothers and Underworld), "A Perspective" also features key works from other sources that shaped their shining path to musical enlightenment, such as New Order’s "Everything’s Gone Green" and Pete Wylie’s "Sinful", neither exactly staples in the dance music compilation racks.

Elsewhere...well, just look at the track list: St Etienne’s "Only Love Can Break Your Heart", the astonishing Andrew Weatherall mix of My Bloody Valentine’s unremixable "Loveless", which strips out all of the song’s component parts and then stitches them back together in a neat long line to a Balearic drum machine shuffle, Primal Scream’s "Loaded", two knockout tracks from the Chemical Brothers’ pre-fame Dust Brothers EPs (their best work, in my humble opinion), a clutch of Underworld rarities, a Simply Red remix(?!), U2 getting dance music stunningly right on "Salome" (years before they got it tragically wrong on "Pop"), Dylan Rhymes’ "Naked & Ashamed" (the soundtrack to the Schmirnoff cinema ads)...there’s little here that hasn’t achieved outright classic status over the last ten years. It all adds up to the bestest dance compilation to come my way since the indispensable first volume of "Flux Trax", its impact only slightly diminished by the fact that I had half the tracks featured already. If you desire some (only mildly biased) perspective on this whole dance music thing, get it here.