MELROSE

This album is considered by the band as a milestone. If you look at the TD website, the band's history mentions the "Melrose years". Where is the difference? First of all this is not a soundtrack and we are no longer in the 80s. With this album Tangerine Dream becomes a sort of family affair, with Jerome Froese joining his father and Paul Haslinger. Secondly, the high number of soundtracks, which usually have the purpose of commenting images has made the band's sound slide smoothly to newage atmospheres and the title track with its sax is an example. A very good track, anyway.

There are highlights like "Three Bikes In The Sky" but at this point of their history Tangerine Dreams are reluctant in releasing 20 minutes long tracks as in the past. Ten years before they would have probably tied together all those 5 minutes instrumentals, but I think that at a certain point they have realised that separating the tracks is more effective if you look for sales and radio passages. In some moments, "Yucatan" is one of them, I hear similarities with the kind of electronic works released by Peter Bardens in the 80s, "Seen One Earth" in particular. However, Yucatan is one of the album's highlights Other things, like the following track "Electric Lion" are very similar to Micheal Manring's Wyndham Hill releases, so newage.

The real album's highlight is "Desert Train", probably because it's the longest track and contains track of the good old days, with the main theme fo the track which changes several time without being too circular and showing a bit more of composing effort. I would have preferred a better closer instead of the mellow "Cool At Heart" which is mellow also in the title.

Not a bad album, promising of what the 90s would have been for TD, but very far from their masterpieces.