The latest horse to flee the Ministry Of Sound stable sees the Sessions brand canter out for its annual appearance. With the MOS crew sticking to the formula, we get taken on a ride through some of the latest “club bangers”, with plenty of house, electro and pop to appeal to the commercial fiends amongst us. The question is: is it an equine beauty that powers home in first-place, or a riderless psycho horse-beast that jumps into the crowd? Do I get extra marks for making the metaphor relatively topical?

Disc one sees Sam La More take the reins, and it’s a mixed bag that swings between moments of commercial dance awesomeness and bits of aural manure. In a blatant bit of self-promotion, Sam kicks the mix off with his recent smash We Run The Nite, and adding a choir of kids is always going to give your music instant appeal (just ask The Smiths, Pink Floyd and Mike & The Mechanics). TV Rock and Hook N Sling join forces for the electro-house monster Diamonds In The Sky [hear it below], and there’s a Scandinavian blast of euphoria with Swedish producer Alesso remixing Danish band Dune’s Heiress Of Valentina.

Kelly Rowland seems to have morphed into a house diva for hire, lending her sultry tones to a pumping Alex Gaudino cut titled What A Feeling, although I was kind of disappointed when I realised it wasn’t a cover of the Flashdance tune.

A trio of slamming house tracks from Ian Carey, MYNC Project and Axwell power the mix to a higher level, which peaks with Sander van Doorn epic Love Is Darkness. There’s a slippery descent into electro hell courtesy of Afrojack and Green Velvet, and then we land in pop territory with The Potbelleez and the mandatory David Guetta track, in this instance Who’s That Chick? with Rihanna, which should keep the toddlers happy.

At the risk of snapping the fine thread of credibility that hangs from my music taste, I’d say it’s pretty hard to resist the subtle charms of Diddy’s Coming Home, although that’s mainly because of Skylar Grey’s vocals, acknowledged by Dirty South in his remix on here that ditches the rap and embeds the vocal in a pulsating electro framework. Saving his best efforts for family, Sam’s remix of Pnau’s The Truth is just heavenly. The original version is epic by itself, but the remix represents one of those tracks where everything just seems to fit together perfectly. Listen to the remix below.

Tommy Trash is in charge of the second disc, and it grabs me a little more than Sam’s mix… no actually, it doesn’t, I just wanted to insert a lame “littlemore” pun in here somewhere. While it probably won’t scale the same heights as Hello, Martin Solveig single Ready 2 Go powers out of the blocks with a massive vocal courtesy of Bloc Party’s Kele.

The Aston Shuffle turn in the impressive bouncing electro-house of Start Again which features the very fine vocal talents of Eden Boucher from Lovers Electric. There’s an intriguing electro-punk aesthetic in Don Diablo & Dragonette collab Animale, and the spacey synth textures of All The Lights’ Chasing Colours are just sublime, as is the remix of Art vs Science’s A.I.M. Fire.

Highlight of the mix has to be Tommy’s surging electro re-work of Gypsy & The Cat’s beautiful Jona Vark, which you can hear an excerpt of below.

In complete contrast, a little further in is the worst track of the mix, which comes in the form of Laidback Luke, Steve Aoki and Lil Jon team-up Turbulence, and the inclusion of Blind Faith from Chase & Status seems like a lazy grab for contemporary commercial appeal.

Fortunately the towering Prodigy re-work of South Central’s The Day I Die swings by to save the day, and Laidback Luke atones for his earlier sinning with an epic peak-time remix of Jump Jump Dance Dance banger 2.0 [listen below]. It’s pretty hard to pick between the two mixes, given that they’re fairly distinct beasts, so I’m going to sit on the fence and say they are both of equal merit.

So as is usually the case with these MOS releases, there are moments of sonic grandeur and moments when you get the impression they raided the filler drawer, although the latter are few and far between. It’s unlikely to disappoint if you like your tunes big and bold, and likely to annoy the hell out of you if you don’t. There’s plenty of decent music to make it worth purchasing, and while you’ll probably never listen to it beyond 2011, you should get at least a few months out of it.

Ministry Of Sound: Sessions 8 is out now.