Surprisingly, it's got more going for it than the whoosh of expensive machinery. Chalk that up to Maas' handle on trance's crucial characteristic: not its abandonment of song structure -- jungle, house, glitch and pretty much every other species of electronica have done just fine without verses or choruses -- but rather its rigid and formal dependence on a closed set of sonic elements. You can manipulate a crescendo in a finite number of ways, so Maas sidesteps that compulsory anonymity by spicing his compositions with healthy dollops of camp (on disc opener "Help Me," which R&B nutcase Kelis ices with sci-fi-film paranoia, and the sexed-up "That's How I've Been Dancin'") and bonhomie (the obviously blunted "Hash Driven"), and a sense of restraint that is the opposite of the genre's typical bluster (the nearly Air-like "Hard Life" and closer "Bad Days"). Of course, it doesn't hurt that a couple of actual songs do show up -- English astral-soul crooner Finley Quaye gives shape to "Caravan," connecting its forward momentum to trance's ancient antecedent, raga -- but Maas needn't get ahead of himself: Just attaching a personality to the proceedings is a step in the right direction.