TURN OF THE TIDES

"Turn Of The Tides" could have been one of the greatest TD albums ever. It's a concept album (auspicious start right there!) and it's a grand,lavishly produced affair with Edgar and Jerome being augmented by guestmusicians on guitar,sax and vocals laying the basis for a quite splendid album. Which fails to appear. What does appear is a wishy washy non entity of a musical hodgepodge which is neither one thing nor another. It starts off,surprisingly enough,with a straightforward rendition of "Promenade" from "Pictures At An Exhibition" (the orchestrated Ravel version),augmented at the end by a compositional twist courtesy of TD seguing it into the first "proper" track,"Firetongues" which isn't half bad,really. Nice keyboard riff,great flamenco type acoustic guitar solo,but the electric guitar is a tad annoying and over the top,something which is to be all too common for the rest of the album,sadly. However,the album moves briskly on with a track which is nothing less than a TD classic: "Galley Slave's Horizon". This piece simply bristles with creativity,from the rolling,wave like intro and the subsequent beautiful piano and vocal part to the coda which is a quite spectacular guitar solo from Zlatco Perica,quite possibly my favourite guitar solo of all time. By this point in the album I thought I was on to a winner,another TD classic. But this is where the good news ends. From the awesome splendour and majestic beauty of "Galley Slave's Horizon" we move to "Death Of A Nightingale" which is an insipid piece of new age dross,devoid of any qualities whatsoever. Next up is the longest track,"Twilight Brigade" which might have been quite good if it hadn't been ruined by needless guitar noodlings of the most pointless kind. However,it's practically a "Galley Slave's Horizon" compared to "Jungle Journey" where TD decides to get funky. Not a good idea for a German electronic band. And to top it off,they engage in a ridiculous twin guitar duel of the Judas Priest/Thin Lizzy kind,as if to emphasise just how much they have lost the plot by this point. Next up is without question the worst track on the album and quite possibly the worst piece of music TD have ever done. What possessed Edgar and Jerome to write and then proceed to record the utter bilge that constitutes "Midwinter Night" is one of the greatest mysteries of our age. This track sounds like it was stolen from the wastepaper basket of Kenny G. A terrible piece of muzak fit only for restaurants. The title track is another tedious stadium guitar workout but the album ends surprisingly with a very good finale called "Story Of The Brave" (Due to a technical error,this was omitted from the album cover). By stretching themselves so far on "Turn Of The Tides",trying to do everything within the space of 57 minutes,they managed only to lose focus and wound up sounding utterly lost. "Turn Of The Tides" marked the end of the "wilderness years" for TD,the latter part of the 80's and first half of the 90's, where they were struggling desperately for a cohesive direction following the loss of Chris Franke in 1987. Frankly,with the lacklustre and uninspiring albums they turned out in those years,I thought that my favourite band was finished. Little did I know that just around the corner lay the new golden age of TD music that has since 1995 produced some of the best TD albums of all time,but that's another story!