Sasha And The Last Crusade

The thing about sequels is that they're always judged against what's come before them.

The thing about threequels - or trilogy closers as the case may be - is that they've got a 50/50 success rate at best, and often drop long after people have stopped giving an actual fuck. So for every Led Zeppelin III, you get a Bat Out Of Hell 3 (which, believe it or not, really is a thing); for every The Blueprint III, you get a The Blueprint III; and so on and so forth.

When Involv3r, the third part in Sasha's innovative Involver series, dropped digitally last Monday, it caused a minor flurry of excitement on my Facebook feed. It's not often that the slightly older, slightly wiser cynics I associate with uniformly froth over an album drop these days, so I joined the community in heading straight for my industry standard download portal and loaded that bad boy up before temporarily departing for foreign shores. (More on that in the coming months.)

We'll get to the previous instalments a little later, but for the uninitiated, Involver is a DJ mix series with a difference. When the original surfaced amidst much hype in 2004, the idea of taking the master recordings of a bunch of artists, turning them into new tracks entirely, then splicing them together in the fashion of a traditional mix CD was a high concept one.

Today, digital trickery sees DJs routinely lay literally hundreds of tracks on top of each other across mixes - see Joris Voorn's 2009 entry in the Balance series, or Royal Sapien's head-caving Stacked mix for John Digweed's Transitions radio show in 2011.

And so we come to Involv3r, where the song remains largely the same even though the tune has changed. Tackling it as its own entity is almost impossible given what's come before, but let's have a crack anyway, shall we?

Things swirl into focus in appropriately grand fashion with Taragana Pyjarama's Growing Forehead and it's vocal loop about "intentions" and "expectations", then head into decidedly housey territory with the classic synth stabs and big hook of ThermalBear's Turn The Tide - imagine the chorus of QOTSA's The Lost Art Of Keeping A Secret over Inner City's Big Fun and you're roughly in the ballpark.

So far, so funky, before Little Dragon's Crystalfilm takes things down a notch into deep-tech territory, The xx's Chained is borderline morose, then Benjamin Damage and Doc Daneeka's Battleships threatens to derail proceedings altogether - and we're only at track five.

Battleships feels like the longest track on the mix, but it's also the least interesting, with a drawn out vocal breakdown that doesn't really kick like it should when the drop comes, and a tinkling synth lead that is more annoying than uplifting. It's also an ear worm - of every track on Involv3r, this is the one that will return to haunt you when you're trying to go about your daily business, whatever that may be.

From here we get a golden run of more traditional Sasha fare, with remixes of Ultraista, Ananda Project, and James Zabiela laying down rotating bassline grooves that put the prog in progressive house. The take on Ananda Project's Moment Before Dreaming is as good as anything Sasha's put his name to, and the programming flow on this section in particular is sublime.

This doesn't signal a bombing raid through to the home stretch, however, but a gradual wind down in intensity. Instead of a finale that reaches for the heavens, we get a directionless four track closing salvo that almost peters out before a memorable vocal closer in Foals' Late Night. There's a seven-track bonus mix of beatless versions that follows, but it's more of a curiosity than anything, and certainly not different enough to its parent mix to go to deeply into here.

The original Involver was jaw-dropping in its audacity and willingness to weave through genres, tempos, and moods with barely a dropped stitch between the seams. Invol2ver was dark, driving, and a perfect example of what you would've heard Sasha dropping on a smoke-filled dancefloor circa 2008. Involv3r is solid, but neither jaw-dropping enough to keep revealing secrets after multiple listens, nor programmed quite dancefloor-friendly enough to get your jaw subconsciously clenching even when it's at its most rollicking.

His new studio dream team of Dave Gardner, ThermalBear and Grayson Shipley are workmanlike in their control of club music dynamics, but their command of depth, texture and emotional clout doesn't hold a candle to the original crew of Charlie May, Barry Jamieson and co. It's like comparing the 2012 Olympics Dream Team to the 1992 originals, except without a LeBron James type to nail the big plays when it comes to the clutch.

On the liner notes, Sasha confirms this is the last time to the plate for Involver, and jokes that he hopes this isn't the musical equivalent of The Godfather 3. I'm yet to suffer through that particular disaster, but Involv3r is certainly no Toy Story 3 style masterpiece - nor is it a Police Academy 3 style embarrassment to all involved, nor are there any Ewoks taking down highly skilled squadrons of the most feared army in the galaxy.

It's more from the Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade school of trilogy closers. The director is still at the helm and in fine form, the concept still has vitality, but the overall execution falls just a little short of its predecessors.

Let's just cross our fingers that he doesn't get the band back together for a fourth entry in the future. Involver's legacy is assured, and the last thing we want Sasha to do is follow Indy's lead and nuke the fridge.

Involv3r is out Friday 12 April.