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"Now That's What I Call Club Hits" by Various Artists
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I’m a fan of efforts to push dance music as a legitimate genre back into the forefront.  Two new releases in the venerable “Now That’s What I Call” series puts dance squarely in the spotlight, with the higher-profile “Now That’s What I Call Club Hits” and the lower-profiled “Now That’s What I Call Dance Imports,” which we found at the same time, but appears to be in a digital-only release.

Both releases offer dance reworkings of tracks that have seen chart success, with “Club Hits” focusing more squarely on U.S. popular artists and songs, while the “Dance Imports” entry spends more time on tracks that had bigger overseas success.  This does cause for overlap where such a layering exists, so P!nk is featured on both albums, with the same mix, in fact, although “Dance Imports” provides a longer “Club Mix” with the radio edit being squeezed into the more-packed “Club Hits” list. Depeche Mode’s “Wrong” shows up on both albums, but with different mixes; the same goes for David Guetta and Kelly Rowland’s “When Love Takes Over.”

The “Club Hits,” which has 19 tracks, comes in with good remixes of popular artists and songs on U.S. radio right now, and manages to avoid the pitfall of “Just Dance” by not trying to squeeze in unknown dance artists.  The remixes offered are generally solid choices, with the superior version of “When Love Takes Over,” a solid reworking of “Boom Boom Pow” (called “Boom Boom Guetta” in honor of the remixer) freshens up the song nicely.  Dave Aude checks in two fun remixes, Lady GaGa’s “LoveGame” and Sean Kingston’s “Fire Burning.” P!nk’s reworking by Digital Dog is nice and actually retains a solid amount of emotion to go with P!nk’s song, a rarity for dance music.  More pedestrian is the remix of Kelly Clarkson’s “My Life Would Suck Without You,” which offers no surprises, while the reworking of Jamie Foxx’s “Blame It,” already Intellituned, now suffers from 45 seconds of the “Blame it on the Alcohol” line getting repeated by New Devices in the remix.  It’s a bit much.

"Now That's What I Call Dance Imports" by Various Artists

Meanwhile, “Dance Imports,” at 15 tracks, offers mixes that might be less familiar to U.S. listeners. I’m a fan of Robyn here, so it’s nice to see a remix of her “Be Mine!” here, and it’s a good treatment.  The Blame Remix of “When Love Takes Over” is a bit disconcerting, given how the beat’s sped up and the singing slowed down.  It’s weird, but fun. Lily Allen’s “LDN” is quite weird in this hand-clapping remix from “Wookie.” Moto Blanco’s disco-laced remix style goes well with Daniel Merriweather, an old soul himself, on the song “Red.” James Ford’s version of “Pop Goes the World” is a funky number and also enjoyable.

Of course, not knowing many of the tracks on “Dance Imports” makes it easier to judge a song on its own merits, without the original to compare it to, so it may be easier to be more favorable on that album; of course, when trying to take the dance field seriously as an adjunct to pop music, it helps when the reworkings aren’t too close or too far away from the originals, so there’s some semblance of the original song there.

Dance music fans will find these both worthy additions; there’s not too many missteps to be had, although each album has a few slower moments.  But for most, “Club Hits” is more essential than the “Dance Imports.”

Packaging note: “Club Hits” does two unusual things, one positive and one negative: On the plus side, they list remixers among the artist, a nice touch and a wise thing to grab dance fans.  On the negative, they caved to that blonde girl in shiny metallic outfits craze that seems to be a recent requirement for most dance collections.  It’s the first time a person has appeared on a dance album, and is entirely unnecessary.