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!

This is one of the weakest albums of Tangerine Dream's history, a brand name which just ten years before released the magnificent live album Poland (1984). OK, back then we had a very different group, formed by Edgar Froese, Chris Franke and Johannes Schmoelling. Franke left in 1988, replaced by Paul Haslinger. We still had the half decent Optical Race and the fairly good Lily on the Beach (1989), but then Haslinger left and since then we've been having only glimpses of creativity.

Turn of the Tides, made by Edgar Froese and Jerome, is a perfect example of TD's creative death that was the 1990s, with very few exceptions. Having one or other OK track, like Firetongues, does not save this album. This definitely deserves 1 star, only for completionists. I had a copy and fortunately was able to resell it. The space this album was occupying in my CD shelf was more important than this music.

I probably fell into the same trap as a lot of other long-term Tangerine Dream fans after first hearing this 1994 effort, comparing it (unfavorably, of course) to such unqualified TD classics like "Phaedra", "Ricochet", and "Stratosfear". Maybe it was the anonymous sheen of all those new digital keyboards, or else the steady diet of generic dance-floor drum programs. But at first exposure the album sounded little better than boilerplate New Age movie soundtrack mush.

All right, so their musical strategy is more conventional than it was in the old days. But the band in the 1990s needs to be measured with a different yardstick. This is not your parent's Tangerine Dream anymore, and neither does it pretend to be. On its own merits the music itself is often gorgeous beyond description, sounding on some tracks ("Galley Slave's Horizon") not unlike the classic symphonic Prog of Andy Latimer and CAMEL: quite a radical departure from the counter-culture doodles of their early Krautrock days.

There's even (further shades of Golden Age Prog Rock) a concept of sorts behind it all. The album was composed around an obscure, allegorical narrative penned by the prime T. Dreamer Edgar Froese himself, apparently after one too many screening of a Wojciech Has movie (remember "The Saragossa Manuscript"?) The mood is set, oddly but effectively, by the "Promenade" from Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition": an unconscious nod, perhaps, to fellow synthesizer advocate Keith Emerson? This brief but luxurious version was arranged by TD debutante Linda Spa, with the sounds of a horse-drawn carriage on rain-swept cobblestones adding to the overall cinematic effect.

Spa's recruitment into the band still tends to confound the more chauvinistic corners of the Tangerine Dream fan base. But to these ears her graceful handling of the saxophone adds a welcome soft touch to a band historically obsessed with the latest electronic hardware. Likewise, a notable performance by guitarist Zlatko Perica brings the typically cosmic TD sound even closer to Earth, trading his sometimes overwrought pyrotechnics (see "220 Volt Live") for a more polished approach, often with an unexpected Spanish flair (as on the track "Firetongues").

Approach it with skepticism if you must, but don't dismiss the album without an impartial hearing. Too much good music can be irretrievably lost when doggedly kept at arm's length.

This is another winner in the very extensive TD discography. It is amazing to notice how effectively the band was releasing good albums one after another (even if some scarce flows can be noticed once in a while).

I was of course curious to listen to their version of "Pictures At An Exhibition" that I discovered in the early seventies with ELP (I don't know the original version, shame on me). I have to say that they pass the test quite well to be honest.

There are no masterpiece tracks featured here (at least I feel so), but some engaging music that combines both electronic with Middle-Eastern influences ("Firetongues").

Of course, as "Neu!mann" says in his reviews, this work can't be compared to the several masterpieces that the band delivered, but it remains of pretty decent quality. The addition of several members do provide a variety that was not too often met in their previous releases, the best of which is held by the superb sax play from Linda Spa during the excellent "Midwinter Night" for instance. Same nice feel can be experienced in the smooth and atmospheric" Galley Slave's Horizon". The one of that kind too much probably being "Death Of A Nightingale".

Another good and quite diversified track is the long "Twilight Brigade". The closing section is just brilliant: it consists of a superb guitar solo which is maybe one of the best that can be heard on a TD album. Really impressive. The upbeat (and somewhat "tribal") "Jungle Journey" is also a fine moment which contrasts with the usual atmospheric TD mood.

One blunder though here: the closing and title track which is too much "dance" oriented to my ears. The band released some of these previously (but hopefully not too much). And even if it is one of the longest track available on this "Turn On The Tides", one out of eight is not a drama, right?

Three stars for this good album.