In recent years, there has been some serious noise coming out of ol’ Ireland way on the trance front. The man responsible is the one John O’Callaghan. While his big breakthrough was the anthemic Big Sky where he teamed up with Audrey Gallagher (along with the powerful Agnelli and Nelson remix), his remixes and collaborations had already built some serious foundations. Listen to his BBC1 Essential Mix from late 2008, or his Trance Energy set in Holland earlier this year, and his driving, hard tech trance sound is front and centre. You might even say his sets have serious balls. And in search of more of that harder driving trance, you could be forgiven for actually looking forward to his second studio album, Never Fade Away..

Ah, no. Try again. Hard? Driving? Powerful? Pumping? No. No. No. And no. Fluffy? Soft? A little la-di-da? Yes. It actually reminded me of that iPrimus advert from a little while back: ‘not what you were expecting?’. NO!

In short, it’s almost like he took what was obviously a winning, and ridiculously popular formula from Big Sky, added a touch more ‘fluff’ and chose to see how many times he could multiply it. Quite a few it would seem. Who knows, maybe it was a dare or something, ‘cos here, it seems relentless: soft beats, vocals that fail at being contagious and just end up being plain annoying, and just a series of tunes that sound far too much the same and ultimately disappoint. Then again, if you like the soft and fluffy stuff – go get it. Now.

His collaboration with Giuseppe Ottaviani Liquid Fire is a touch tougher, dirtier and more of the O’Callaghan style we’ve grown accustomed to, and while Broken sounds suspiciously like Sander Van Doorn’sControl Freak it too provides for a nice sea-change from the Big Sky ‘formula’. Similarly, Megalithic, a collaboration with Aly & Fila, and with a name like that, I guess it does come to the party with some of that harder banging stuff. It’s probably the best of the lot, but tucked away as the second last track, there’s a good chance you’ve already lost interest, and it really is too little too late. And in case you’d forgotten how fluffy trance can be, and Big Sky wasn’t enough, they’ve given us the ‘acoustic’ version instead to wrap it all up. Pa-leez.

Invite me to an O’Callaghan set, and I’ll be there. Give me something like this however on CD, and I’ll throw it back at you. A huge disappointment for something that promised so much. If his sets have balls, he needs to take them with him to the studio, and not leave them behind the decks. Next time JOC.