THE SONGS OF DISTANT EARTH

I can fully understand those who think this is a masterpiece; this is a whole piece of music, very well integrated and flowing perfectly from beginning till end and introducing several themes along the way; the main theme(s) comes back towards the end building up to a great climax; the guitar work is among Oldfield's best and the production values are very, very high.

However, the programmed drums that runs through much of this album gets boring after a while (I just don't like this type of drums!), and many of the vocal passages give this music an Enya/Enigma sound and feeling that I just can't get into. Is this New-Age music? Well, not really but you could probably call it New-Age-with-electric-guitars.

Favourite moments are the bag pipes in Magellan and the guitar work in Ascension.

This is a good album, and one of Oldfield's better ones, but hardly a masterpiece of progressive rock. (Maybe a masterpiece of New-Age-with-electric-guitars, though, if that was a genre).