DUNES

Gentle and beautiful

Mr L Simonnet creates large, beautiful and all the time evolving landscapes with his keyboards and with the help of the backin group of guitar, bass and drums. Music is harmonic and melodic and slowly flowing. Probably completely boring for those who like more rock and metal music but in my ears this is simply charming. Both the guitarists (there are guests) end the keyboard sing great solos over the landscape keeping the music interesting and progressive. I enjoy every minute of this album. Wonderfull. IMHO thiswould be a good addition to what ever prog collection. In my own scale this is a five star album but as an objective value I'll give it four stars.

CHANCE is a band from France and ''Dunes'' is their debut album from 1993.Laurent Simmonnet is the main man behind this project trying to create emotional pictures with his keyboards.The work is completely instrumental and the closest comparisons that come to mind are DOGMA and THE FOUNDATION...As for the biggest influence it's easy to notice that Simmonnet is a big fan of CAMEL with all those emotional guitar solos,driving flutes here and there and the mainly mellow keyboard lines...Sounds like an interesting album we have here and in fact that's the way it is but there are also some really weak points...

The music on the whole tends to be monotonous and repetitive.If you listen to the very nice first track is as you have listened to the whole album.The tracks are amazingly similar and equal or if you like you have to deal with the whole atmosphere in all of the tracks...They spin off with some soft keyboard or acoustic guitar work,the music somewhere takes off,then goes down again etc...The same cocept in all tracks!I found this quite monotonous...I'm also a bit sceptic about the sound of flutes and other wind instruments coming out of the keyboard,they sound so digitalized that in the whole this sound turns me off...And after all this kind of music is very enjoyable but so overall played that doesn't intricate me much...

This is a good work in general.Fans of CAMEL,DOGMA and neo prog acts like PENDRAGON or JADIS will find something to like in this one...To my ears it's a carefully arranged but slightly boring and unoriginal work and,although I would like to push my rating to 3 stars,I will not,in order not to be unfair with some other really interesting 3 star works...So 2.5 stars it is...

I first discovered the second album of the band and quite liked it. So I decided to give it a spin to their first one. FYI, this band plays pure instrumental music, but that's fine with me. This album is dominated by the use of keyboards but electric guitar is quite present too.

Darkest Light opens the album quite beautifully : slow & very melodic intro. The tempo speeds up and then turns really frenetic with a quite hard guitar solo before being again quieter towards the end. A very good and diversified track indeed.

Countdown reminds me ''Genesis'' (Cinema Show) influences strike hard ... But that's not to bad a reference, is it ? Lots of mellotron in this track and a guitar solo that has some moods of Mr. Carlos Santana himself (Samba Pa Ti / Europa style). Lots of emotion here for me...and the highlight from this good album.

Over The Sea reminds me of ''Land's End'' (but that's almost normal with such a title track) : good piece of music also built in crescendo. Next tracks Dunes & Dream's Cost are more recommended when you are ready to enter Morpheus' arms. Again, quite Land's Endesque for the former while the second one will draw you into Gilmour's arms.

The closing track ''All About Us'' is built like most of the other ones : a nice crescendo sequence with keyboards which is leading to the guitar solo. Maybe a bit too much stereotyped though. This is globally a good effort that deserves three stars.