Todd Terje: It's Album Time review – worth the 10-year wait, but only in parts

You could never accuse Todd Terje of rushing giddily into the business of making an album: the prosaically titled It's Album Time arrives a full 10 years after the release of his first single. A lot has changed in that time. Back then, Terje was just one of a string of Scandinavian producers working in a fertile area where disco revivalism met a kind of sun-kissed eclecticism inspired by the early-90s Balearic scene. He distinguished himself by his apparently insatiable desire to produce unofficial remixes of tracks that demonstrated an admirable disregard for even the most elastic notions of "cool": there have been a lot of re-edits of old disco tracks in recent years, but only Terje took it upon himself to come up with a dub-inspired version of the Bangles' Walk Like An Egyptian.

Today, Terje is one of Europe's most revered dance producers, thanks to a string of incredible singles that often ended up the among the most popular and acclaimed club tracks of whatever year he chose to release them in. It's Album Time concludes with the biggest of the lot, Inspector Norse, from his 2012 EP, It's The Arps. It fades out, replaced by the sound of a crowd trying to sing along with the track's hookline, cheerfully undeterred by the fact that it doesn't really have one – creating dancefloor euphoria without recourse to the thunderingly obvious being very much Terje's signature move.

It's Album Time thus arrives with expectations running high, but Terje seems keen to bring them down a little. One interview, ostensibly to promote the album, featured him complaining that he hadn't had time to finish it to his satisfaction because his wife got pregnant, and announcing that he was "ashamed" that it included several previously released tracks: Inspector Norse, plus two other tracks from It's The Arps, and 2013's Strandbar. For good measure, he also dismissed Inspector Norse as "boring nu-disco".

It's difficult to know whether this is heartfelt, or just an example of the dry sense of humour that's marked everything from his stage name – which no one seemed to notice was a pun on the name of house legend Todd Terry until Terje started pointing it out – to the album's cover, a cartoon of Terje as a lounge singer, besuited and dripping in jewellery, leaning rakishly on a piano surrounded by cocktails. Either way, it gives you an insight into It's Album Time's flaws – although not quite the insight that Terje may have intended.

There's certainly nothing wrong with a producer as talented as Terje feeling constrained by the style of music that's made him famous and wanting to spread his wings. It's just that the areas that Terje spreads his wings into feel a bit hackneyed. If a dance producer attempting to demonstrate the breadth of their musical ability by filling up their album with ersatz jazz and pastiches of movie soundtracks isn't quite as cliched as one doing so by filling their album with terrible hip-hop featuring rappers 20 years past their best, it's pretty close, particularly when the movie soundtracks in question are of the John Barryesque 60s spy thriller variety.

In fairness, Terje occasionally comes up with something original to do with his influences: Oh Joy marries a riff clearly inspired by Roy Budd's Get Carter theme to chattering Giorgio Moroder synths, and Leisure Suit Preben intriguingly shifts its rhythm from an ungainly, lumbering swing to something more streamlined and sleek. But more often he doesn't: in a world where you can hear all the jazz-influenced 60s library music you could want with the click of a mouse, you do wonder why anyone would want to listen to Todd Terje homaging it on Alfonso Muskedunder.

In addition, those tracks lack the effortlessness that's characterised Terje's work to date, even when he deliberately set obstacles for himself: the It's The Arps EP was the result of Terje tasking himself with making a record using nothing other than an antiquated ARP2600 synthesizer, but you never would have known while it was playing. It's Album Time's Svensk Sas, however, feels exactly like a jokey conceptual exercise that was probably more fun to make than it is to listen to, not least because, this time, Terje has set himself the task of constructing a track entirely out of samples of scat singing – a trying listen, even in moderation.

That said, there's still plenty to enjoy here. The older tracks sound as fantastic as ever: they're too well crafted to be dulled by familiarity. Bryan Ferry heading up a slow-motion cover of Robert Palmer's saga of relationship anguish, Johnny and Mary, is an interesting idea with suitably epic results – even if it loses something in translation, namely the way the rhythmic tautness and cyclical melody of the original underlines the idea that the song's protagonists are going round and round in circles. Delorean Dynamite, meanwhile, is flatly brilliant, a glossily confident piece of house music, its sound influenced in equal part by disco and 80s AOR. It works its exhilarating magic in a really subtle and intriguing way, and comes complete with a gorgeous, echo-drenched coda. It's a perfect example of what Terje can do when he isn't killing himself trying to do something different.