MELROSE

I remember liking this one more than Lilly on the Beach. The opener, Melrose, had a thrust, the strings cool, the bass a driving pulse, simple, almost like Too Hot for My Chinchilla, but more mellow. I liked it, but still, it just didn't kill! I just kept hoping that Tangerine Dream, now armed to the teeth with the best equipment in the industry to make interesting electronic music would really make things happen after Optical Race.

What happened instead, were a lot of lush chords being held... (two, three, four)... then held (two, three, four)... then... sigh... held. It seemed to me the compositional style was mere adjacency of some Korg Synthesizers grooving at 80 beats per minute.

To its credit, I have to say that even today in my Ipod, Three Bikes in the Sky-- perhaps the most dramatic piece they've done that decade-- is always loaded up and in my rotation. It is fantastic, a nice work of 12 string guitar and lush pads blossoming to yield some killer dual guitar lines from Edgar Froese. He bends and sustains his notes brilliantly in harmony along two tracks.

We get more guitar ferocity in Yucatan which is smooth, urgent and elegant in movements that, though may not seem very descriptive at first, really grow on you. Even Electric Lion has this effect and it's hard not to melt away in into the pulsing spaces and cascading brilliance delivered by Jerome Froese's guitar lines. His style is more frenetic than his father's, though Jerome a (at that time) budding technical player could be hiding a bit behind a delay effect. Ok, Melrose is a good album, a pretty good one in fact, even if it's sorta coffee shop music.

At times, especially when listening to Rolling Down Cahuenga, and Dolls in the Shadows I feel like I'm listening to the album equivalent of the less clever brother of Optical Race pining away for some kind of relevance.

But then on the other hand, I'm humming along to Art of Vision and it's optimistic whimsical bell phrases, and even bobbing my head while listening to the enjoyable meandering jam-out of Desert Train which I can sometimes imagine the piano line being played by Schroeder in the ABC Television Special "The Berlin School is Out Charlie Brown." There are days that I enjoy it for what it is, and then there are days where I just pop the cd out and instead play Poland.

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