RUMPELSTILTSKIN (OST)

Once upon a time ... my favorite electronic rock band Tangerine Dream decided to turn the fairy tale Rumpelstilskin (about a miller's daughter who made gold out of straw thanks to the evil dwarf Rumpelstilskin) into a muscial piece with the help of famous Kathlee Turner as the story teller. She does a decent job, no more or less. The music by Tangerine Dream (Edgar Froese and his son Jerome) sound less electronic than we are used to, more mellow and romantic so it matches perfectly with the fairy tale. The CD contains a poster with on the front Rumpelstilskin and on the back the entire lyrics in English. The lesson: children should be confronted with progressive music from a very early age! Let's wait for other progressive bands to turn fairy tales like Snow White and Cinderella into muscial pieces, perhaps something for popular melodic progrock bands like Magenta, The Flower kings or IQ ..? By the way, this album is a nice effort but more for collector's than the average electronic music fan because it's too far away from interesting electronic music.

As well as Mark Isham with "Thumbelina" and the Clannad with "The Angel And The Soldier Boy", also Tangerine Dream have released an album made of few instrumentals on one side and the A side of the album filled with the same tracks as background music for a fairytale.

The fairytale is read by Kathleen Turner and if you are not interested in this very old horror story (as many fairitales are) which was later adapted and modified by the Grimms, we can move directly to the B side.

The music is more mellow than usual. Very melodic, not repetitive, quite newage. If it's good to background a narrator it has to be good as background music in general. The intersting thing is that I usualy see Froese & co. as sequencer geniuses, but this time we can hear piano, major chords, passages maybe a bit trivial, but not bad at all.

There's not much more to say, the B side is a good newage album with a touch of progressive, with some little highlights like "The Countryside" which is quite a good track. It sounds like the Greek keyboardist Yanni who was making this kind of things in the same period.

2 PA stars, but quite nice.