Another week, another drum-n-bass compilation. Can I get any less enthusiastic about engaging this two-disc set? Will I wrestle it to the floor, or will its poisonous muscularity overcome and dispatch me, leaving me to limp wounded back to my Hefner-obsessed chill-out dome? Or will DJ Die's righteous selections convince me that all hope is not lost for this once mighty style. Maybe it'll even prove that jungle compilations are not just dysfunctional sociopathic clones of each other, riddled with narcissistic genetic disorders and genre-mutilating mutations.

Drum-n-bass diehards would clutch me to their skinny, sunlight-deprived bodies, were I to assert that this latest roll-call from Roni Size's perennially underground Full Cycle label abounds in genre-mutilating mutations. In such warped minds, the downward spiral of intertextuality and crude Robocop-isms is one freakily sick manifestation of sweeeet progress.

While tracks such as Roni Size's "Answer Back" and Die's own "Driver" have been engineered for wholesale clubfloor devastation, they don't really do much for a Sunday afternoon session with sour cream Doritos, a few beery pals, and obscure memories of the night before. I can find little use, outside of a club environment, for Krust's monotonously bleepy "Resistance" or Scorpio's "Samewayz" with its insistent Ringo-on-jabba-jabba-juice cymbal crashes. Relentless, mercilessly crumpled beats and foundation-wrecking bass belong in darkened firehazard chambers, with portals monitored by insecure men in 48" leather jackets.

Because DJ Die knows that many people who congregate in clubs are utter wankers, the second disc of this set is a mixed set which incorporates all but three tracks of disc one and a dozen others of a very familiar bent. With this second disc, Die saves you from going out to the club and the attendant hazards of getting sticky liquids accidentally-on-purpose spilt onto your fake Versace leather trews.

But is that the real point of providing this mix disc? If you really wanted a nightclub in your home, you'd have done it long before Die served up this collection. You'd have resigned yourself to being around tossers. You'd have reasoned that, in this world, everything has a downside and that the price of flailing yourself around in inexact mimicry of a torrent of 180 bpms is doing that with 400 other beered-up fools. Hmm, but you could also rake in enough cream to pay for your neighbors' silence about all their kiddies doing shameful things out on your vial-festooned front lawn. You'd set up your club because every other slacker-turned-entrepreneur has seen nothing but huge profits in rounding up evilly narcotized or idiotically naïve kiddies in a space designed to rear veal cattle and have some coked-up jerk-off blast "underground" anthems at their corralled, methed-up minds.

As such, Full Cycle: Through the Eyes Presented by Die will save all you club entrepreneurs at least one big name DJ's appearance fee. You'd have admitted into your club enough smack peddlers to insure senselessness amongst your up-for-it audience. They'll be too mashed to notice whether the skinny bloke teetering in front of the brilliant white lights is really Die, Van Dyk, Oakenfold, or your cousin Raymond who's driven in from the country to score some debilitated raver ass. For those of us of a less larcenous constitution, this compilation has the longevity and novelty of a Crackerjack toy. And we can wait till next week for an even more current collection of anthems for zombie majorettes.

-Paul Cooper