DUNES

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...