THE BLUE YEARS STUDIO ALBUMS 1985-1987

A nice set of the most new age inflected ones among Tangerine Dream studio albums. Let's take a comparative look:

Disc One "Le Parc": As the title states, this is a mosaic composed of a miniature for each one of the selected parks. Somewhat conventional at times, but always with a timely mutation in harmonic or rhythmic texture coming around the corner.

Disc Two "Green Desert": The best of the batch to my taste. The music is very reminding of the Virgin Years, because it was recorded in Berlin in 1973, and just released in 1986.

Disc Three "Underwater Sunlight": Have you already seen enough underwater life documentaries? If that's the case, skip this. If not, you are in for a treat, with crystaline synth textures, and a classic Edgar Froese electric guitar solo in "Ride on the Ray".

Disc Four "Tyger": The female vocals on the poem by William Blake are okay, but not what I look for in a Tangerine Dream. I just use to go straight to "London", a sort of mini-suite with good electric guitar parts.

The mid-1980s found Tangerine Dream focusing far more on their movie and television soundtrack work than on standalone studio albums - which means that this boxed set isn't really telling the whole story when it comes to their activities from 1985-1987. Further complications arise from the inclusion of Green Desert, because whilst that release was finished off with additional recordings in the 1980s the earliest components of it came from the 1970s.

Nonetheless, this is a good value collection offering a nice snapshot of the New Age-tinged style that the band adopted in this era. Aside from on Green Desert, the spacey style of their 1970s works is absent, and this is very much in the style they adopted in their mid-1980s soundtrack work, making this a bit less essential but still worth a shot for fans.