The word legendary gets bandied around relentlessly in the music industry, but for the mighty Spooky the term must surely hold weight and particularly for sound sculptor Charlie May. Responsible for some of the lushest electronica to emerge from the post acid house scene in the UK, May is a producer of near mythical proportion. He produced under the Spooky moniker with partner Duncan Forbes for one of the most seminal dance labels of all time, William Orbit’s Guerilla Records. Even more impressively he has worked very closely with progressive giants Sasha & John Digweed as remixer and sound engineer for their various remix and production projects. With Sasha, May has acted almost as an exclusive ‘hand on the desk’ and the two have conjured progressive house music’s magic moments, namely Xpander (which was an old Spooky riff that Sasha tweaked into a trance monster) and Sasha’s superlative artist album Airdrawndagger.

It is a devastating resume: he and Forbes undoubtedly deserve their legend status. Past Spooky albums confirm that even more so, with the recently re-released Gargantuan recognised as a cornerstone of 90s dance music (featuring the absolute Renaissance anthem Little Bullet ) and often over looked follow up Found Sound etched experimental techno and IDM into the progressive landscape. Now almost ten years later, after forging a indomitable reputation as studio artisans, Forbes and May are back in 2007 to release Open, a brand new studio album with vocalists Julie Daske and Celestine Walcott-Gordon.

So with all this pedigree and history, why is Open so mind numbingly boring? I don’t think even Spooky could answer that but the album is drastically flat and relentlessly unimaginative. Over nine tracks Spooky seem to ride a wave of downtempo balladry that expose the weakness of their primary singer Daske, who merely vanishes into Forbes and May’s intricate but predictable wall of arrangements. On Sasha’s Involver album, where Belong was the exquisite four/four center amongst a torrid soundscape of mournful breaks and longing electronica, Daske cut through your heart with white hot melancholy. On Open she whimpers through out incessantly and Belong, in its original form, sounds surprisingly hollow compared to the dance floor pyrotechnics of other versions.

Elsewhere Spooky venture into space as familiar as a Cafe Del Mar disc would. Shelter imitates Protection-era Massive Attack without the Bristol dub smarts, New Lights is pure marshmallow disco with faux gospel diva posturing and dub-driven Strange Addiction tries to implement an epic atmosphere, but it’s intentions fall astray with tried and true strings being cautiously licked by only occasionally stirring vocals from Walcott-Gordon.

Last track, imaginatively titled An Ending, offers some reprieve as it is by far the strongest cut on here with Walcott-Gordon putting in a fine vocal over gorgeous splashes of warm bass and swirling, dreamy Rhodes chords. Unfortunately it is too little too late though, as Open is severely disappointing given the epic structure shown on Gargantuan and the profoundly interesting experimental leanings shown on Found Sound. The decade rest has proved to be a fatal hiatus for this once peerless dance act. R.I.P.