GOBLINS' CLUB

The last Tangerine Dream album I purchased and indicative of much of their later stuff.The drums and guitar give the album almost a rock feel but once you get to about the 25 minute mark boredom starts to set in.The music is directionless and just seems to be passing the time till the end of the album.Best avoided.

(3,5 *) Many Tangerine Dreams have surprisingly few ratings. I'm only the second to say this is a good one. Not a masterpiece but a solid, enjoyable work which I can't say about many other post-Tyger (1987) albums I've heard: they mostly just bore me. One clear reason to make this better is Jerome Froese's tasty drumming. It is pure music. In 'Raising Haul of Silence' I enjoy the drumming almost more than in any music; it's in a word hypnotic. He plays guitars and keyboards too, like his father.

The album features many guest musicians and that results in a rich sound - cynically it could be said that it's only to hide the hollow composition. But I don't say so. Some of the eight are duller than others but there are some very enjoyable ones. And I think THE SOUND is always the most important matter with Tangerine Dream anyway. I see this as an improved cousin of Underwater Sunlight, containing wider palette and more acoustic instruments (Edgar is a master of 12-string!), and that wonderful percussion. It gives you both energy and relaxation. Beautiful cover art too.

Those TD fans from the 70s who purchased this album in 1996 on the back of widespread publicity (for their first release on the Castle label) received an almighty surprise. And not a pleasant one either.

'Goblin's Club' is nothing like early TANGERINE DREAM, of course. Nor is this album much like the dreadful soundtrack stuff they squandered their talents on in the mid-80s to mid-90s. It is, in fact, pure prog rock. Just not very good prog rock.

Apart from the first track, that is. 'Towards the Evening Star' is the sort of catchy number that makes you think perhaps EDGAR FROESE has recaptured his mojo. Lovely stuff. However, the rest of the album is, without exception, sterile. The coldness that worked so well for TANGERINE DREAM when delivering their 'Berlin School' material simply renders this stuff irrelevant. Why spend money on formulaic, over-elaborate mechanistic compositions when there are thousands of albums out there that could change your life? This won't.

Terrifyingly, TD gets on the world music bandwagon years after it left town and samples ANOU D'MERIAN's voice. Even ENIGMA did the eastern voice theft thing better than this. The list of guest artists do their best to paper over the compositional cracks, but even gorgeous sound and excellent performances do not mask the emptiness here. The drums are nice, the guitar very nice, the synths beautiful. All the more reason to deplore the substandard material they were working with.

And most frightening of all, this is better than virtually all the other TD albums of the last twenty years.

This album do not have many positive points for itself. Unpleasant cover, strange title, does it also features the worst TANGERINE DREAM music from the 90's? Maybe not. "Goblin's Club" shows a slight evolution from the previous record. Less rock-riented, the musicians now incorporates more modern ambient/world music elements, in the styles of DEEP FOREST or ENIGMA. However the proposed metarial here is still globally mediocre.

As in the previous record, the first track is undoubtly the most interesting. "Towards the Evening Star" is catchy and contains unexpected progressions. A nice surprise, but unfornately the only good composition here. The rest of the album sometimes introduces original sonorities, but not developed enough and caught in the flow of flat and rather boring melodies.

Although presenting style improvements, "Goblin's Club" is not really better than the former 90's releases of our german dreamers. At least, it will be the last TANGERINE DREAM of its kind of this decade. On their next studio album, the band will recover their lost creativity...

Tendentially newage as many of the Tangerine Dream outputs of this period, this is not bad. Surely better than most of their movie soundtracks of the 80s, in this album we can hear some proper drums, something that If I'm not wrong, was absent from the TD lineup since Electronic Meditation.

There's a huge number of guests but at this oint TD is simply a family affair between Edgar Froese and his son Jerome who seems to be a decent drummer, too. Even if both the Froeses can play guitar, the lead guitarist when needed, is Mark Hornby. This wasn't his first collaboration with Tangerine Dream and won't be the last for few years. If this album sometimes sounds more like a Mike OLDFIELD one is possibly because Hornby played also in some Maggie Reilly's albums, so there's a link.

Apart of this curiosity this album doesn't have many points of interest. The music is melodic and is best sevred when the drumming is electronic, like in "Lamb With Radar Eyes", which is one of the best album tracks, featuring a good guitar riff from Hornby in which I see another connection to Maggie Reilly: he sounds similar to Fenn in the MASON+FENN album "Profiles" released 10 years before in which Maggie sung "Lie for a Lie". It's just a coincidence, by the way I think.

Looking at the track titles, it seems that there's a sort of concept which may explain also the album's title, but also this is just a guess. The mention to Merlin in the closing track's title doesn't say much. This track is also the longest and in my opinion the best. It has a bit of celtic mood in the beginning, then the old good square wave becomes the base for a melodic track which is still newage but in which we can capture some hints of the past glory.

So it's not an album to be thrown in the waste. Not one to which I'll return often, but good enough for about 40 minutes of light relax.