FIVE MILES OUT

While following in much the same vein as QEII compositionally, this album is much stronger. "Taurus II" is a side-long piece, and Oldfield's strongest composition since the latter half of Incantations, with a highly memorable main theme, and lots of other strong sections. The rest of the album also contains a number of strong pieces, with the title track, parts of Orabidoo, and Mount Teidi all harkening back to themes in Taurus II. So, in a way, the entire album comes across as a coherent musical statement. This also happens to be the album when Oldfield scored a commercial radio hit (covered by Hall and Oates) with the song "Family Man". While Oldfield would write a number of hit singles throughout the 80s, and even into the 90s, I still to today think this is his best single, and while I am not generally prone to commercial singles, I generally look forward to listening to this one. I like Oldfield's version much better than Hall and Oates' version too. But apart from the single, the rest of the album is strong. It shares with QEII and his other albums from this time period a tendency to excessive instrumentation (additional synths and sequencers, which were now common by the early 1980s), but unlike QEII, Platinum, or Crises there is no track that is off-putting here. The albums is generally highly musical and listenable all the way through. I give it 8.5 out of 10 on my 10-point scale.

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