Various artists: We Make Colourful Music Because We Dance in the Dark – review

Celebrating the first five years of the electronic music label based in Berlin and run by Joe Goddard of Hot Chip, this double disc showcases both Greco-Roman's taste and its connections. There are early recordings by Disclosure and Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs (TEED), alongside big remixes by Soulwax and Lone. There's a variety of genres, too, from garage and grime to glitchy bass music and vocal house. Greco-Roman describe their output as "leftfield electronic pop", and while Hot Chip attest to the joys that can be had when such a combination succeeds, the risk is of music that falls between two stools. Sadly this is often the case here: while there's a lot of brightness and colour, there's not much in the way of melody (the exception, sadly, being TEED's Garden, long since used to sell mobile phones). The general lack of shade and complexity is only made more galling when it does eventually appear, as on Micachu and Tirzah's Not Dancing, and the best track in the collection, Four Tet's hypnotic remix of Goddard's own Apple Bobbing. If this is a tour of contemporary British sounds, it's not an especially exhilarating one.