DISCOVERY

Discovery sounds more like an Alan Parsons Project album than a Mike Oldfield album. This is especially apparent on songs like Poison Arrows, Tricks Of The Light and the title track. Typical of Alan Parsons Project albums is that there are different singers on different tracks; this is also the case with Discovery. The female sung Folk Pop of To France and Crystal Gazing remind me very much of Blackmore's Night.

Discovery is almost a pure Pop album with only very little of Mike Oldfield's musical identity. Only the instrumental 12 minute The Lake is in the typical Oldfield style we know from his earlier albums.

Mike had flirted with Pop music before on albums like Platinum, Five Miles Out and Crises. But on these albums the balance between Pop and more progressive material was about half of each. On Discovery the balance tilts heavily towards the Pop side of things. In one sense this is a good thing because it gives the album a sense of direction that the other mentioned albums lack. Crisis was a particularly schizophrenic album, with the excellent progressive title track filling up half the album while the other side contained some awful Disco Pop songs. Nothing on Discovery is as bad as the worst songs from Crisis, but also nothing reached up to the Crisis track.

As far as Pop albums go, this is not bad at all. But it is not very impressive either and I can only recommend this to Oldfield's fans and collectors.