The new Vinyl Pusher double CD mix boldly sets out to showcase the local house scene with the album’s press release stating their intention to “develop Australian dance music for the world!” However, while we all know that there’s a shitload of amazing Australian production out there, this effort is not a brilliant advertisement for our producers, with a lot of tracks that are simply uninventive. The start of Marcus Knight’s mix sounds like we’ve heard it all before, with a couple of tunes that could easily have appeared on a Ministry compilation a decade ago. A Ricki Lee remix is the first track that makes our ears prick up, and even that could have been lifted from a Hed Kandi mix in 2004.

Knight then drops the pace down with some soulful male vocals and it seems like we’re going somewhere, and somewhere good. But Knight then does an abrupt about-face by jamming in his own reworking of Vertigo, an awful electro house stinker, followed by his own reworking of the equally horrendous Rackhunters. Knight attempts a recovery with another change of pace, back to the female vocal house with first the electro influence of The Answer and the decidedly trance influence of Body and Soul. A trancey sound – covering the uplifting, commercial, and darker sounds of yesteryear – can be heard in the rest of the album, which is similarly all over the place and not helped by Knight’s propensity to drop his own tracks in at inopportune moments.

Melbourne’s Andrew Padula had me in raptures with his stellar mix on the inaugural Vinyl Pusher mix, 2005’s Addictions. While his Move disc easily has the edge over Knight’s, it’s a far less coherent effort than he’s shown in the past he’s capable of. He opens with a pretty generic effort from the Bass Chimps, Something About, and returns a track later with their similarly soulless Can’t Stop. The tunes bookend the Mark Knight and Funkagenda rework of Man With The Red Face, a subtle reworking of the seminal Laurent Garnier monster that is out of place at track two and sandwiched between the vocal house. Padula lets it play out for a lengthy 7 minutes, and while the gorgeous saxophone of Philippe Nadaud keeps things interesting, the same can’t be said for many of the house-by-numbers tracks that are allowed almost as much airtime. The result is a flat mix that struggles to engage.

The mix takes a further downward turn at track four, a reworking of another classic, Robert Miles’ Children. The track selection is curious to say the least, and of particular offense is the reworking itself. How many club moments have you had in the last year where you’ve heard a fantastic song from yesteryear being mixed in, only for it to disintegrate into a grating and generic electro house breakdown? Yep, that’s what we’re faced with here. Please, DJs, please just play the fucking original. If only we had known that Soul Central’s Strings Of Life was a relatively enjoyable sign of what was to come…

Thankfully Padula doesn’t throw in any more half-baked blasphemy, instead taking focusing on the track selection and improving the flow of the mix. There’s still a few unoriginal electro house speed bumps, but Padula definitely recovers as he heads toward the standout (and least Australian) track on the compilation, the Deadmau5 mix of Morgan Page’s sublime Longest Road. Then it’s into tech-house territory with You Lose before a curious couple of final tracks that sound like Sven Väth as reinterpreted by a house producer. I’m not kidding, J Tease – Bitchin combines the rolling snare and hissing effect you’ve heard on every minimal track in the last two years with the same black guy you heard on every house track in the 1990s pulling out cliches like ‘It’s all about jackin’ house’.

Move definitely has its moments, but unfortunately there’s too many unoriginal productions and too much poor arrangement that never let either mix settle into an engaging groove. We’ve heard better from Vinyl Pusher, let’s hope they return to form with their next effort.