Van Buuren is one of the biggest names in dance music and the current #3 DJ in the world (as voted by a DJ Mag poll). He continually pushes the bar with fresh trance sounds. This is the next chapter in his annual mix album series; a two-disc continuous mix of this year's hottest trance tunes from a stellar lineup. Alongside Armin's superior mixing skills, "A State Of Trance" is an inspiring and uplifting aural experience.
The 2007 entry in Armin Van Buuren's State of Trance series takes awhile to get going, but eventually kicks in with the blissful epics that have made him one of the world's most popular DJs. On mix records, Van Buuren usually expresses the two sides of his DJ personality via the two-disc format; disc one is filled with frothy vocal trance, the other is populated with more progressive material. SoT 2007 stays true to form. This time out though, there's an obvious disparity in quality between the two. Van Buuren goes downright cheesy for his lighter disc one (called "on the beach"), and with a few fleeting exceptions like Kalopsia's "The Blizzard," it's pretty forgettable. However, the second, more progressive disc ("in the club") improves noticeably as AVB leads off with two self-produced bombs "Miserere" and "Rush Hour." It still has a high cheese level to be sure, but its excesses are cut with relative dark matter like the lovely mashup in the middle of the disc, consisting primarily of Reh Mundi's "Perspective" and Ronski Speed's "The Space We Are." As with contemporaries like DJ Tiësto, Van Buuren seems to believe he needs to be all things to all people, but his more commercial instincts are too pronounced here, leaving his more devoted fan base with only half a mix to enjoy. --Matthew Cooke
