The next time someone asks you which gigantic multi-CD box set you want for your birthday, forget about that Thin Lizzy retrospective you've been eying. The Complete Terrance Trent D'Arby will still be there next year. And you already own all of the music that's in The Backstreet Boys: The Early Years. So what else is there? Well, I don't know if these Rough Guide CDs can be purchased all together in a giant box set (I suspect they will at some point, once they've all been released), but damn if you wouldn't be the heppest kid on the block with your stack of brightly colored CDs, full of the coolest music from all over the globe!

This disc is sort of a novelty in the series; rather than focusing on a specific country or well-established genre, it takes the rather ill-defined "global dance scene" as its starting point. The "glue" here is supposed to be that in the last decade or so, DJs from all over the world have begun mixing local styles of music with international flavors (Italian batucada, UK Asian Underground, Bollywood soundtracks), thereby creating localized versions of the "new universal language" of dance music. While that's certainly true, this disc feels more like a friend's really creative dance music mix tape than a lesson in international dance music movements. And maybe that's really the point -- even though each of the tracks on this disc has a distinct flavor, they're all more or less identifiable as the kind of thing that wouldn't be out of place in any reasonably hip dance club, whether it's in New York, London, Rio or any other cosmopolitan party city.

The countries represented on Global Dance are: Tunisia/France, Germany, Nigeria, UK/Columbia, Brazil, UK/India, Austria, Denmark, Italy and the US/Haiti. This isn't a continuous mix; the tracks don't flow into each other, and the tempos are sufficiently mixed to cause at least a bit of awkward floor shuffling while the crowd waits for the next funky drummer to kick in. But if you're planning a dance party, or even if you're just looking to do a little booty dancing in the living room with a special friend, you really couldn't do much better than Global Dance.