CYCLONE

A controversial album for TD. Many fans didn't like this when it came out. Peter Baumann had left and the now duo of Froese and Franke had added a singer(Steve Jolliffe) and a drummer (Klaus Krieger). Jolliffe also plays wind instruments and keyboards. This is actually one of the few TD albums that comes close to symphonic prog.

"Bent Cold Sidewalk" is one of the best TD songs, IMO. It starts with some of the finest use of vocoder ever. I think one of the main reasons they hired a singer was so they could use a vocoder! This song is the closest TD came to sounding like stereotypical '70s prog. The middle section is based around a sequencer part with Jolliffe playing flute and/or piccolo. Later there is some weird but great gibberish vocals. My favourite part of the whole song is at the end where you hear "bent cold sidewalk...open the gate". Superb. While some of the stuff TD did around this time could be described as New Age, "Rising Runner Missed By Endless Sender" sounds instead like New Wave. The only other song with vocals and the weakest one on the album.

The instrumental "Madrigal Meridian" starts off spacey. There is a fairly steady drumbeat until about 15 1/2 minutes when the drums fade out. At around 10 1/2 minutes there is a nice sequencer part with a guitar solo. Jolliffe plays some nice wind instruments on this song (piccolo? Cor anglais?). Near the end we get string-synths and some clavinet. The piece ends with some very violin-like synth playing. Around this time TD were really starting to use all the latest state-of-the-art synthesizers. They encounter the same problem that some fusion keyboardists and guitarists making 'fuzak' at the time did: using the latest technology does not equal interesting and timeless music. It took about another ten years before many figured this out.

One of their worst '70s albums but still nowhere near as bad as some of the post-1984 stuff. Oddly, this would make a good introduction to TD; especially fans of symphonic prog. They would keep the drummer for the next album but not use singing again until the late '80s. Overall a good album. 3 stars.