DESERTED PALACE

"Deserted Palace" was Jarre's first solo output, released in 1972. It displays lots of experimentation and noodling and the overall result is pretty weird, very close to early avant-garde electronic. The songs rarely last over 2-3 minutes, all of them being varied and experimental, some of them are actually pretty good, though some of them also fail to pleasure me badly! The songs are not easy to like unless you are open mided to genres like Krautrock or early progressive electronic genres fan, cause this is completely different from later Jarre albums, such as Oxygene and Equinoxe. It's like The Residents meets some weird experimental 70's electronica. The song titles might give you another idea how this album sounds, considering their similarities with the title and the melody. Jarre uses only a few keyboards here; EMS synthesizer and the farfisa organ to create this weird music, but if you ask me, he should have added a couple of more different keyboards here to make this album more varied and perhaps a bit more interesting overall.

If you are interested, get it (if you can find it, the original vinyl is extremely hard to find), but don't expect too much. But if you liked "Les Granges Brulèes" (Jarre's second album, a movie soundtrack), you'll probably like this one too!

2 stars are the most I can give to this album. I would have rated it 3 if the production and some of the songwriting were improved further and if the works had better melodies. For fans!