THIEF (OST)

Tangerine Dream had already dipped their toe into soundtrack work with their 1977 soundtrack for Friedkin's Sorcerer, but it was with Thief that they took what had been an interesting diversion and turned it into what amounted to a second career for them. Tangerine Dream's soundtracks were quintessentially 1980s, so I suppose it makes sense in a way that this was produced for that most 1980s of all directors, Michael Mann - and indeed, an awful lot of their soundtrack work consisted mostly of riffing on a bunch of the ideas first aired here.

What makes Thief stand out from some of their more phoned-in soundtrack work is the way that it manages to walk the tightrope of capturing a particular zeitgeist without sounding clumsy or dated. The synthesisers have an undeniably 1980s sound to them, but Tangerine Dream manage to make them work in a way that so many others in the 1980s struggled to by accepting and appreciating the sounds and textures produced by those 80s synths as interesting sonic ingredients in their own right, rather than treating them like cheap, crappy stand-ins for "real" instruments.

By respecting their synthesisers' output in this way, and adding additional elements (like some actually quite decent guitar) to add a few highlights that couldn't be accomplished with synths alone, they produced a piece which ends up being rather more interesting than the sort of imitative work turned out by many of their peers (and, for that matter, themselves) in its wake.