Zoo Brazil, aka Sweden’s John Anderson, is certainly up there as an extremely accomplished producer of underground house, equally adept at concocting stripped-back techno as he is with melodic prog anthems like Crossroads. He effortlessly keeps his feet in both camps, and has proved his stripes as a crafter of certified club bangers; here though, we’ve got an attempt from Zoo Brazil to put together a proper ‘artist album’, though with considerably less success. Twelve club stompers thrown together on a CD hardly makes for a compelling, cohesive album, but that’s exactly what happened here.

Anderson’s versatility is on display almost immediately. Opening with some melodic vocal tech with There Is Hope, it then shifts into a few harsh, aloof tech house numbers, before throwing down the progressive vocal bomb You Could Have It All, that’s been embraced by some of trance’s biggest names like Armin van Buuren, Tiesto, Roger Shah and beyond. It’s followed by an equally accomplished vocal prog number in Locus, while Rampage is big-room tech house in the vein of what we often hear from the Toolroom Records stable. On the other hand, Fix is loud in-your-face techno. As it should be well obvious by now, there really is a lot of versatility on display here.

However, Please Don’t Panic doesn’t really see Zoo Brazil thinking outside of the 12-inch single format. Not even for a second. There’s deafening silence between the tracks, like you’ve set your iPod to randomly “shuffle” to another one of the tracks you picked up off Beatport the other day. There’s never any sense of progression, and it never really sounds like anything more than a collection of (admittedly, super tight) singles. You might as well just have actually downloaded $30 worth of Zoo Brazil singles off Beatport.

As much as it pains me to say it, it’s lacking the flow of even an amateur DJ set, and the versatility doesn’t rescue Zoo Brazil here. There is absolutely nothing really wrong with each individual piece of music, but with no overarching ‘vision’, Please Don’t Panic becomes less than a sum of its parts.

Please Don’t Panic is out now on Magik Muzik/405 Recordings.