Leave it to Nettwerk to put out the mother of all cynical compilations. And I'm not talking about the way the label capitalizes on the term "chillout", appealing for your hard earned cash while lazily stretching the genre's taut ambiguity (to Nettwerk's ears, anything under 140 beats per minute seems to qualify). I can even live with the calculated way the corners are padded with Nettwerk's own artists (any smart label would do the same). No, the primary offense is that The Best Of Chillout Past And Present cannibalizes previous volumes from the same insipid series. That's right, Nettwerk has committed the ultimate slacker move, putting out a virtual best-of compilation of their Chillout compilation series. Has this been done before?

Okay, to be fair, Nettwerk recycles only five tracks. From Chillout 2002, there's Dido's "Here With Me", Massive Attack's "Teardrop", Ivy's "Edge Of The Ocean" and Delerium's "Silence". From Chillout Vol. 4 comes Conjure One's "Center Of The Sun". These are all decent -- if predictably vanilla -- tunes, but I'm not cutting the label any slack for drawing them from the same well. It's just plain lazy. There doesn't seem to have been much passion or logic behind this volume, either, as evidenced by its opening track. Kicking things off with The Postal Service (a buoyant remix of "The District Sleeps Alone Tonight") seems like an inspired move, but then you realize why you paid admission in the first place: Postal Service, who are about as chillout as Erasure, show up for no other reason than because they're red-hot hip.

Other inclusions are innocuously obvious. BT's "Satellite" has already made rounds on countless other chillout comps, while Moby's "Porcelain" makes an utterly useless appearance -- the target market already owns Play and has probably buried it in the backyard by now (next to the Spice Girls). The only track here that actually fits the brief is Badmarsh and Shri's "Signs". As remixed by Bonobo, a premier downtempo artist of Ninja Tune fame, the track's futurist lounge grooves are meaty enough to save The Best Of Chillout from utter failure, though not enough to make it worth trading more than few bucks with the Nettwerk machine.