Chicane needs no introduction, I’m positive everyone has listened to and adores Far From the Maddening Crowds and Behind the Sun. I’m not here to reiterate those points, in fact I’m now here to plead the case 2007′s Somersault. Widely panned by critics and fans alike, it fell way short of expectations after a leak destroyed the (also detested) 2003 album Easy to Assemble. What the hell is Nick doing? We want Ibiza ambiance, not Deleri-pop! Right? Q Music hated this disc the way I hate Rob Schneider and Andy Dick, or the way Pitchfork hated Shine On by Jet. (Take a second to click that link. It’s okay, I’ll wait.) Even Virgin Media ripped it to shreds. It wasn’t pretty:

Somersault – which opens with recent Tom Jones-led single Stoned In Love – is probably best appreciated if you can associate every song on it with a wonderful emotional moment on some terrace or dancefloor in the Balearics. Without it, it strays into overproduced muzak, neatly ignoring everything exciting that’s now happening in dance music. Pilfering beats from UNKLE albums released nearly ten years ago and chopping up guitars and plaintive vocals over the top does not make for innovation.

If I didn’t know any better, I’d think these people harbored sadistic grudges against Nick Bracegirdle because of his tumultuous history with labels. That may not be entirely off-base, because UNKLE has never sounded good enough to be pilfered in the first place and these vocals are far from plaintive. Here’s the deal: On the surface Somersault is not what we expected from our favorite chillout artist of the last decade. It’s not the source material’s fault that it alienates the Ibiza trance subgenre with nowhere to go. It’s music, for crying out loud. It doesn’t need any other labels except Flippin’ Good. That’s right, anyone who insists otherwise can bite me.

Rooted in this disc first of all, are two astute rescues from the ill-fated Easy to Assemble disc: ‘Spirit’ with Jewel and the delightfully lush ‘Arizona’ — though the disgustingly-addictive ‘In Praise of the Sun’ perished in the fire. Second of all, with Bryan Adams tapped out (It was only a matter of time, right?) a new singer Jack Starks stepped up and performed on no less than five of the album’s tracks, essentially making him part of the band. It’s quite similar in dynamic to Hybrid’s addition of Adam Taylor for Morning Sci-Fi, only without the trainwreck and with the added benefit of Starks being able to hold a note without going flat. He’s actually quite good. ‘Come Tomorrow’ and ‘Nothing’ respectfully stand their ground as pop-trance harbingers, while ‘Far Away From You’ is filled with so much epicity I was able to loop it for all 40 minutes of my 4-mile run around the lake yesterday.

This isn’t rocket science. You don’t have to stuff 10⁶ layers into your tracks and be a part of the next post-rock electro-punk uber-indie hipster movement. There’s plenty of that already, and if your name isn’t Sigur Rós, Hammock or Ulrich Schnauss, you have no business tarnishing the book written by Slowdive anyway. The work on Somersault far exceeds that of its material peers on Tiesto’s Elements of Life and Armin van Buuren’s Imagine. It’s not fair to burden Chicane with the expectations of past works, but more germane to assess the work in the context of its vision and goals. In that regard, it succeeds admirably.