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Scads of garage bands on those "Pebbles" or "Back From the Grave" compilations were flagrantly unoriginal — part of their charm was the way they earnestly garbled "Purple Haze" or "I'm A Man." But if the collector scum who scarf up such comps weren't so ultimately puritanical, they'd get the same lobotomized punk-junk buzz from this putative workout mix, the organizing principle of which seems to be house music's unimaginatively imaginative relationship to its own disco/funk history. Are the mostly anonymous outfits here, with handles like Blockster and Trickster, remixing, sampling or merely covering super-obvious staples from P-Funk, the Bee Gees or the ubiquitous Loleatta Holloway? You won't care as you sweat to these oldies, made newies yet again. Their dumb, cut-to-the-chase glory is summed up by the title of the "Love Rollercoaster" reconfiguration by the Radical Playaz: "The Hook." Particularly noteworthy is K. Hand's "Family," where the "We Are Family" sample repeatedly threatens to break into the vocal chorus, trading the usual vague melancholy such flashbacks evoke for transcendent idiocy. And at the very least, this collection houses some of the finest dance-floor smashes in recent memory: Cevin Fisher's "(You Got Me) Burnin' Up," Armand Van Helden's "U Don't Know Me" and Peter Heller's "Big Love," which looks back to the super-unobvious "Wear It Out" by Starguard. Only the bookends, Trinity Hi-Fi's "Turn the Lights Down" and Big Ron's "Jacques Your Body," don't belong (Les Rythmes Digitales' "Jacques Your Body" would have made more sense).
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