ROSETTA

It's incredible! 15 years after his last proper release if we dont' consider Alexander's soundtrack, Vangelis is back with an amazing space-rock opera. As well as Mythodea released 15 years before, the idea is about making a soundtrack to a space mission, but while the previous didn't work very well, as it was a bit too pretentious and effectively closer to neo-classical music than to prog, this time he is back with a surprising album.

Rosetta is a probe launched by the Euroepean Space Agency which landed on a comet, the "67P/Churyumov- Gerasimenko". It takes its name from the famous "Rosetta stone" which permitted the translation of the ancient Egyptian scripts into Greek.

Now, if you can imagine travelling in the outer space, in apparent absence of motion, with the light of the stars constantly breaking the darkness, the silence of a solitary starship. How do you think a soundtrack should be like?

Exactly like this, I say. Vangelis alternates low volume melodies, orchestral grandiosity, sadness, electronics in a mixture able to evoke all the sensations possibly related to the space travel. Only the title track is an exception. The same sounds used for his famous "Alpha" in a canon made of minor chords, like he did unite the mentioned "Alpha" with "Hymn" from Opera Sauvage. Honestly it sounds a bit "recycled material", but I'm a Vangelis fan and I think I know his tracks enough to notice the similarities. Not a bad track, but I put it on a lower level respect to the rest of the album.

Said so, everything else is excellent. "Philae's Descent" which follows the title track, restores the level. It's undoubtely Vangelis' stuff of the best category. Since now, the tracks fade one into the other following the concept like it was really a soundtrack to the mission.

The square waves of "Perihelion", reminding of the Virgin period of Tangerine Dream, the classical mood of "Elegy" that Gustav Mahler would have liked, lead to the excellent closure which has some similarities with Hans Zimmer's sountrack of "Interstellar" (not strange, of course).

An unexpected masterpiece of Progressive Electronic with a little flaw in the title track preventing me from rating it with 5 stars.

For who likes being lost in space for about 1 hour

The first Vangelis album in fifteen years not affiliated with a movie soundtrack doesn't fully rekindle the same creative spark as his best work from the 1970s, but it likely won't disappoint fans. The origin of the album and its connection to the European Space Agency Rosetta mission, which in 2014 successfully landed the first probe on the surface of a comet, is detailed elsewhere in these Archives. But the music stands well enough on its own without the ESA endorsement, as an extension of its author's fascination with astronomy: always a reliable taproot for Progressive Electronic music.

The new album works best when exploring the ambiance of infinity, as heard in the opening tracks after with the robust "Origins" fanfare: quintessential Vangelis, grandiose and elegant. His vision of the cosmos is both awe-inspiring and yet totally benign, always able to locate a beautiful melody in the vacuum of outer space, unlike the intimidating voids conjured by early Tangerine Dream or Klaus Schulze.

But even on an interplanetary trajectory the album never achieves the escape velocity needed to outpace its earthbound neo-symphonic synth arrangements. The music of Vangelis is always less interesting when the composer indulges his middlebrow classical instincts (think "Chariots of Fire"), and with all his state-of-the-art digital equipment the results here are too often indistinguishable from a genuine orchestra in search of another movie to score. Listen to "Sunlight" for proof, as it approaches the romantic majesty and bombast of an Ennio Morricone soundtrack to an imaginary Sergio Leone sci-fi epic: "Once Upon a Time in the Asteroid Belt".

More compelling (if equally melodramatic) is the "Rubycon"-era Berlin School sequencing at the start of "Perihelion", which I like to think was an homage to the memory of Edgar Froese, sadly relocated to a new Cosmic Address while this album was being recorded. And the late Carl Sagan is likewise indirectly honored in the title ballad: an updated echo of the stately Vangelis classic "Alpha", famously used in the original PBS TV series "Cosmos". Note too the track named "Albedo 0.06", presumably identifying the reflective coefficient of comet 67P/C-G: less than one sixth of Earth's Albedo 0.39, for new music not quite diminished to an equal degree from the celebrated 1976 album of the same title.

"Rosetta" was nominated for Best New Age Album at the 59th Grammy Awards, a double insult to an artist of any integrity (the first affront being the nomination itself; the second was the lame-ass category). The album is in fact a respectable and at times even persuasive accomplishment, from an internationally-honored composer who at age 73 no longer needs to prove himself, and certainly not to the corporate bean-counters of the U.S. Recording Academy at their annual back-patting ritual.

`Rosetta' is a very unexpected but welcome return album from legendary Greek composer Vangelis, his first non-soundtrack work in over fifteen years, and an intelligent, exquisite and atmospheric work it proves to be. Space travel has been a recurring motif in some of the keyboardist's earlier back-catalogue, including 1976's experimental space physics-themed electronic work `Albedo 0.39' and the divisive neo-classical `Mythodea' in 2001, and the artist here offers a fully instrumental collection of elegant ambient/electronic compositions dedicated to the Rosetta space probe mission and its team.

Opener ` Origins (Arrival)' is a widescreen cinematic-flavoured synth overture with trickles of electronic loops dancing majestically in the classic Vangelis manner, regal organ piercing the black space canvass, drifting seamlessly into the sprinkling of chimes and low-key ebbing hum that infuses `Starstuff's gentle ambient caress and its lightest of rising/falling oscillations. Mystery permeates `Infinitude's classical sweep of synth choirs and emulated orchestration, tasteful romantic themes suddenly rising up between the glorious twinkling piano and ringing crystalline slivers of `Exo Genesis' that could have easily appeared on many of the artist's Seventies works, and the brief `Celestial Whispers' is a cooing synth lullaby. Gurgling break-neck sequencer patterns bounce over brooding darker soundtrack-like veils and tense rumbling drums throughout `Albedo 0.06', and the contemplative synth rumination of `Sunlight' rises with joyful grandeur in its uplifting second half.

The title track `Rosetta' is a strange one...it's a welcome change from what's been presented on the first half of the disc, but it implements guitars, trumpet and orchestration (hard to tell if they're all emulated on the keyboard or the real deal here, as no firm instrument list is provided in the CD booklet) to present a slightly syrupy romantic theme that would call to mind the pristine fragility of `La Petite Fille de la mer' off his wondrous early 1970 soundtrack `L'Apocalypse des Animaux' if it was much more restrained. `Philae's Descent' is another of those frantic and busy electronic- symphonic scores fraught with tension that popped up on his `Albedo 0.39' and `Heaven and Hell' LP's, while `Mission Accomplie (Rosetta's Waltz)' is a victorious synth fanfare that may remind some of his `Chariots of Fire' soundtrack.

`Perihelion' is far more intriguing, an electronic nightmare of bombastic orchestral-like blasts and wild distortion, but it oddly mines slight elements of well-known Pink Floyd pieces, mostly the darker synths of `Welcome to the Machine' and pulsing breathless beats of `On the Run', but there's also lovely light fizzing washes and electric piano tiptoes in the softly gliding outro. `Elegy' is one last sumptuous classical piece, and closer `Return To The Void' is a final spacey soundscape of liquid trickles and deep-space immersion teeming with life in the manner of early Tangerine Dream just as they were switching to more electronic dominated pieces. It's a beautifully surreal and trippy finish, and it's just a little bit of a shame that this set hold more of these sparse and dreamy pieces.

Although `Rosetta' doesn't quite recapture that schizophrenic, anything goes from album to album creativity and freedom of his first two decades (and nor should it have been expected to!), there's so many nods and instantly identifiable qualities to a wealth of past Vangelis works throughout it that fans of this master composer will lap up. Tasteful and sophisticated, yet certainly not commercial or anything close to something that could be dismissed merely as `New Age' music, `Rosetta' is a dignified and eloquent work from a master composter of intelligent music that progressive-electronic and eclectic keyboard works fans should highly appreciate.

Four stars.