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Mike Oldfield - Crises CD (album) cover

CRISES

Mike Oldfield

 

Crossover Prog

3.51 | 508 ratings

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SouthSideoftheSky
Special Collaborator
Symphonic Team
3 stars While Ommadawn is Mike Oldfield's best album overall, the title track of this album is in my opinion Oldfield's best individual song ever. He sings on this track himself and that really makes me wonder why he ever bothered to bring in other vocalists on his albums. He can sing just fine, I think.

While most of Oldfield's music is clearly progressive, I would say that the Crisis track is one of the few things he ever did that were truly progressive rock (with the emphasis on the latter term) - this 20+ minute song rocks harder than other Oldfield songs.

If the whole album was as good as this track, I would not hesitate to give this a four star rating. However, this album is grossly inconsistent. Having different vocalists, on different tracks on the same album (almost) never works! Moonlight Shadow and Shadow On The Wall (though both very good songs) could have been much better if Mike had sung them himself. There is nothing wrong with they way they are sung by Maggie Reilly and Roger Chapman but they are out of place here.

The remaining two vocal tracks, however, could not have been saved by anything. In High Places is a horrible disco flavoured song sung by Jon Anderson (and even if I love that guy his contribution here is not to my liking - to say the least! If you like Jon and Vangelis you will certainly like this song.) The very worst song on this album, however, is Foreign Affair which is an even more horrible disco tune sung again by Maggie Reilly. I skip this track on every listen!

The short instrumental Taurus 3 (has not much to do musically with neither Taurus 1 nor Taurus 2 though) is very good. It is driven by a very fast acoustic guitar and also has some louder bits that sound like 30+ guitars put on top of each other! A rather typical Oldfield experiment.

So the conclusion is that this album has one fantastic track, one good one, two ok ones and two horrible ones. I wish I could give this album four stars, but the unevenness stops me from doing that. Still, this is highly recommended for the excellent title track.

SouthSideoftheSky | 3/5 |

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