Pick-me-ups don’t come more headstrong than this. Shinichi Osawa heads straight onto the dancefloor in ‘The One’ with a remarkably successful cover of the Chemical Brothers’ ‘Star Guitar’, and he doesn’t look back. Quite often he sounds like a pumped up Armand Van Helden, especially when doing the faster house tracks, but he has such an array of styles on this album that really the sound is all his own. Whether it’s dirty, sharp-tongued electro, hugely uplifting house or big, computer game type stompers such as ‘The Detonator’, Osawa sounds totally at home – and the riff in ‘Maximum Joy’ is a perfect example of the amount of adrenaline he can generate. Only the occasional down tempo tracks come up a bit short, but since ‘The One’ comes with a second disc of remixes from the likes of Van Helden, Van She and Herve, there’s absolutely nothing to quibble about.
5 Out Of 5
Reviewed By: Ben Hogwood
