HOLLYWOOD LIGHTNING

Hollywood Lightning ends a marathon of nine 2007 compilations (most of them released only as a download product on the official site and mentioned nowhere else), done in less than a month and obviously picking on the new label which serves Tangerine Dream and the new heights of expressions (despite not being high at all!) that the band is trying to achieve. Or, mildly and generally said, explosively surfacing an old material (nothing later than the late, optical 80s), in a conceptual or period-bracketing context. Just as a reminder, the roughness and ordinary ideas into compiling The Dante Collection (Arias and Songs), the uneasy or un-fashioned music in the rest of the "collections", from Starbound and Silver Siren to Ocean Waves and Cyberjam, plus the low depth or (respectively) plain natural program in additional compilations like The Soft Dream Decade and Canyon Cazuma couldn't make the entire, humongous project one of a good kin and an overall worthy value. Hollywood Lightning ends it badly, even borrows the patheticness and pointlessness of which the entire sum of works could be accused of.

The choice of music could be most original from all nine (in a mirroring contrast with the Dante Collection, the first of the series, which roughly extracted vocal and instrumental songs from the Divina Commedia trilogy), but it bumps, twice, in an unpleasant way: by recommending the two volumes of ambient, sound and theme music called The Hollywood Years, it ironically ruins the good taste of a compilation, narrowing the music and the frequency to a mere release (and not a strong period of time and style); by recommending, again, an album like The Hollywood Years, Hollywood Lightning surfaces one of the worst projects of the 90s (a decade, itself, plagued in many ways).

Ultimately, speaking about this compiled material is close to describing the two original volumes, despite that the selection isn't concrete, neither complete, neither truly representative. Created as studio albums, but using a lot of unreleased and un-included music, Edgar and Jerome Froese (back then the only musicians left to keep Tangerine Dream alive) processed the style of ambiance, melody songs and electric/artificial/synthetic keys into a frame of easy, "soundtrack-like", "hollywoodian" music. Obviously, the craft of both volumes is artificial, the long drift of 15 short pieces per volume is also a long and crazy monotonous experience, whilst, electronically speaking, the synthesizing quality is very much undermined by "new-age" or "melody-striking" ideas, while the rest of the music is just too superficially easy. The Hollywood Years is a "compilation" itself, gathering small essences of the worst kind from the entire 90s decade - and, amusingly, it made 1998, along many, many, many compilations, a bad year for electronic music or "tangerine dreaming".

Hollywood Lightning, as a distinct work done inside the narrowness of the Eastgate studios, gathers (through 15 pieces, just like one normal volume was made of) both the decent and the nasty pieces that breath throughout the original project, notable being those that have a musical grip, but can't resist the gentle breeze of new-age or the shining artificiality of electronic manipulation. It's not worth it, as an experience; it barely has a chance, as a value and a realization.

I have never personally given a one star so loosely, but Hollywood Lightning ends, on one hand, a compilation project that is high on nothing special (and, though not really entirely, on nothing good either), and, on another hand, remembers a really impossible to listen - and like - album.

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Posted 1:01:46 PM EST, 12/26/2007