Talk about formulaic – but this is a good formula. I hadn’t thought of it this way before, but this is early 2000′s trance – compare to Ian Van Dahl’s ‘Castles In The Sky’, released a few years earlier, or even ‘Days Go By’ by Dirty Vegas in 2002.

Stringy analogue synth lines introduce the track, giving us a sort of baseline, establishing a foundation that the rest of the song will build up from. Hints of trancey staccato synth blips filter through, delayed out to echo around amongst the sort of wash of trance pads, until it all gives way to exactly what we’re hoping for at 0:56 – a cymbal crash, four-by-four kicks, bass on the offbeat, hihat layered over top, and the persistent synth line. Things slow down for a bit at 1:54, because there’s only so much stereotypical trance you can take in one sitting, and the instrumentation acquires some nice dramatic piano, which it sweeps up into more bars of classic trance.

Things slow down again around 2:56, breaking down until we’re left with some quiet bass, the trance synth cutting back in, some splashy cymbals, and a nice breathy lead that flies over the rest of the instruments – this is the peak of the song, where all the elements that’ve been introduced are all playing together.

Naturally, the epic echoey piano is brought through again at the end, while everything else calms down, and then everything swims into a way phased-out pad that refers back to the previous track ‘Marrakech’ earlier on the album, and leads into the next one, ‘Collides With Beauty.’

It isn’t unique, it isn’t special, but it’s not bad either – if you like pictures of Jesus, you don’t care that the dozen or so in your collection all look nearly identical, even they’re created by different artists. You just like looking at that iconic depiction of Jesus. Same with this – if you like this particular brand of trance, then you like this track, and if you’re a DJ, you love it because it mixes so effortlessly into any of the others.