FLASH GORDON (OST)

This album has been ridiculed all over the net. It's definitely not one of the best band's efforts, but it's undounbtly among one of their most progressive works, simply because is spacey soundtrack.

The most annoying thing on this album is stupid inclusion of dialogues of the characters from the motion picture ("Flash, I love you buy we have only 14 hours to save the Earth!"), and that makes this album much less enjoyable, not to say less listenable. I heard somewhere that the version of this album without dialogues exists, but I was never able to trace it.

However, if you can mentally erase these unnecessarities in your head and focus on the music itself, you might be pleasantly surprised because there are some quite nice musical moments. The most recognisable is the main theme called "Flash's Theme" - actually the one that everybody knows is slightly remixed and labelled simply "Flash". You can find it on numerous compilations, but it isn't inclued on the album itself.

"Footbal Fight" is nice up-tempo tune, and "Attack Of The Hawk Men" is probably the best, nice, catchy, it deserves to be called epic although is not very long (almost all the tracks are very short). There's only one line of dialogue worth mentioning: Vultan's battle scream:"Who Wants To Live Forever!!!". What a prophecy, the same words will label a song from the second Queen's soundtrack, half a decade later.

It seems that other reviewers love to skip a few tracks that I really like: "The Kiss", beautiful chords from May's guitar, equally gorgeous string arrangements and high pitched Freddie's voices in a role of another instrument, giving very spacey mood. Brilliant. "Execution Of Flash" is also worth mentioning, it sounds like a impressive sound vignette and really reminds me of execution.

The song that is closing the album, "The Hero" is along with the opener only track that have lyrics. It's realy rocking, on a heavy metal edge, with orchestral break and main theme repetition in the middle, and the track is ending with a colosal explosion. Nice.

The rest of the tracks are just a soundscapes, Mercury and May were playing with Oberheim synthesizer producing dissonant sounds, to be very honest, not very imaginative. And there is "The Wedding March", which is basically just a brief adaption of the famous classical piece (Richard Wagner was not credited though). Hm...adaptation of a classical piece = prog!? OK, but the result is hilarious.

At the end of the day, this album provides a few VERY enjoyable progressive moments, but the 50 % of material is simply not up to the job. Sound effects are good enough for a movie background, but the vinyl is different media with a different dimension. Too bad the boys from the band weren't aware of that. An extra disadvantage are the obnoxious dialogues. Alright guys, this was your first effort, hopefully next time will be better. Here are few spare stars for you. You ended a chapter in your career with an experiment. And now, beware. The eighties are about to begin!