Look how much you've grown, Astralwerks! Has it really been seven years? Gosh, it seems like just yesterday you stormed America with your techno and lured away our hippest, least-motivated kids to abandoned warehouses and lenient clubs. Even the word "techno" itself sounds like ages ago, doesn't it? But now you're the biggest, most popular purveyor of big beat this side of the Atlantic. Well, what better way to celebrate the moment than to compile an album of all those moments we might have missed while waiting in vain for grunge's second wind.

God, we were so uncool, huh, Astral? But since then we've traded in our flannels, guitars and needles for oversized pants, turntables and ecstasy tabs. Some of us who are especially hip have loads of fluorescent plastic jewelry and rave names like Crystal Baby and Venus Moon. We may not have heard the Dust Brothers' "Song to the Siren?" but we did catch on with the Chemical Brothers' Exit Planet Dust. So we're not totally doomed, right? After all, we recognize almost all of the names on this new compilation of yours!

And, not surprisingly, you start off with your biggest seller, Fatboy Slim. "How Can You Hear Us?" which was recorded during the You've Come a Long Way, Baby sessions, replaced "The Rockafeller Skank" on all international copies of MTV's lackluster Amp 2. While not offering a line as infectious as "Right about now, the funk soul brother," "How Can You Hear Us?" is his trademark foot-stompin', digitized funk. Why "Kalifornia" made it on to You've Come a Long Way, Baby and this didn't is beyond me. Regardless, you keep things rolling with Massive Attack's remix of Primal Scream's "Exterminator," which reduces the digital crunch and grating guitars of the original and jacks up the heavy backbeat. The result is a less noisy, but somehow more consistently muddled affair-- not so much raucous as insidious.

But then you slip a little. Groove Armada's remix of Q-Burns Abstract Message's bouncy "Feng Shui" is what you'd get if you slowed down Basement Jaxx a little, moving the sound to a no-man's land between the house floor and the lounge. Brendan Lynch's "The Secret of Cool" remix of Air's sex-lounge ode, "Casanova 70" (their second single, which appears on Premiers Symptomes) is no less inventive. I guess the "secret of cool" is to take a song, add a bigger beat, and call it a day-- or, rather, call it a "remix." You follow all this up with a Cassius remix of, er, Cassius' "Foxxy," a funky house track with a wickety guitar and a sample from the blaxploitation flick Foxy Brown. Maybe it's Tarantino's fault, but this just sounds painfully dated.

But you really hit bottom with Scanty Sandwich's formulaic "This One." The literature is only willing to admit that this artist is from "Norman Cook's own Southern Fried Records." If Scanty isn't Fatboy himself, then he's one of the biggest thieves in electronica history-- thieving a thief, nonetheless. And if Scanty really is Fatboy, his taste in rock sampling is slipping more than we thought; this time he uses the drumbeat and guitar licks from the Knack's "My Sharona." That'll take longer to heal than the Spin cover.

Then, like the trajectory of your seven-year career, you work on redeeming yourself. While Bernard Sumner's vocals are sadly missing from Sasha's instrumental remix of the Chemical Brothers' "Out of Control," the track is an epic 13-minute trip of club heaven. But it doesn't go over well in, say, your parlor. Photek's "DNA" is another standout, bringing us back to the days of Modus Operandi's ambling, offkilter drum-n-bass. I can think of at least five songs that this should have replaced on Solaris; instead, it only appeared on the now out-of-print "Terminus" single.

You maintain quality almost through to the end. David Morales provides a much needed Latin dub makeover of Basement Jaxx's "Bingo Bango." But rather than obnoxious horns we get an adequately skilled Latin guitar and lush percussion. Then, Astralwerks, you offer up a real treat: the Beta Band's "To You Alone," from a now-deleted single. There's the chantey vocals you've come to expect, but also a guileful, skittering beat and an invigorating drum crescendo that'll clear your head from ear to ear.

I can't blame you for ending with the Future Sound of London's "Live in New York," released in 1994 on a promo sampler. As masturbatory as the knob-twiddling is, you wanted to provide a glimpse of your adventurousness back when you were a just young upstart. And FSOL has more or less been with you since then. But what about Seefeel, Freaky Chakra, Tranquility Bass, and even Spacetime Continuum-- they're old school Astralwerks, too. And why tracks from Q-Burns and Cassius when you could have easily found works from Fluke, Innerzone Orchestra or Wagon Christ?

See, we're already getting ahead of you, Astralwerks. Yes, you introduced us to electronic music, but you haven't kept up your part of the bargain. We just don't feel you're cutting-edge anymore. And now some of your best artists aren't really even electronica-- and they're certainly not big beat. Sure, this album is fun, but mostly in a nostalgic sort of way. Which is kind of how we're feeling about grunge these days.

-Ryan Kearney