WHITE EAGLE

This is the only Tangerine Dream album I own, and I bought it because I had heard “Midnight in Tula” on a college radio station and thought it was kind of interesting. There were a number of these sort of syntho-pop pseudo-progressive groups around in the early 80’s, although at least in the States none of them had a particularly strong following: Kitaro, Vangelis, Philip Oakley, Icehouse. Jah Wobble was doing a lot of collaborations; Virginia Astley had a number of solo and group projects; Martha & the Muffins were up in Canada alternating between synthesizer-driven mood music and plain old dance tunes; even Joe Jackson put out Will Power, which sort of falls into this category.

I personally don’t really consider this to be particularly progressive music – it’s more of an album for setting a kind of laid-back mood in the background of whatever laid-back things you want to do while you’re playing it. Frankly I think anyone who tried to actively listen to each track as it works through its various progressions would become rather bored quickly. Some tracks, like “Mojave Plan”, sound like they were made for porno movie soundtracks. That comment is bound to pop up from time to time with any completely instrumental synthesizer-driven work.

That said, there are some decent moods explored on back side of the album. “Mojave Plan”, which occupies the entire 19:55 front side of the record, really just gets to be a bit tedious after a while, with some synthetic sound effects thrown in regularly whether they really add to the composition or not.

On the back side, “Midnight in Tula” is a fast-paced track with pretty much the same keyboard riff repeated over a syncopated beat, but some variety thrown in with the various sound-effects throughout.

With “Convention of the 24” we finally hear some prominent guitar work, although like “Midnight” this one is heavily focused on the synthetic bass tracks. Another fairly repetitive work (I guess that’s the point for this type of music, and you either like it or you don’t). Some of the sound effects are quite rich on a hi-fi, but tend to get lost if you listen to this in mp3 format or under a headset.

The closing track is “White Eagle”, the only song on the album that seems to actually build up towards something instead of just wandering along. This one has some spacey voices meandering in and out a bit, which adds some variety as well, and the way the piano kind of pitter-patters around the bass line is actually very pleasant. This is also the only song on this album I’m aware of that has made it intact onto any of the many Tangerine Dream compilation albums.

Like I said, this is my only Tangerine Dream album, and I have no basis of comparison with their other work, so I can only judge it on its own merits, and perhaps by comparison with some of the other synthesizer-driven experimental music of the early 80’s. On that basis, I wouldn’t put this one really high on the list, although there’s nothing particularly negative I can say either – other than it’s kind of boring if you actually try to concentrate on the music while it’s playing. So it seems that two stars is probably appropriate. It just doesn't feel like this is a very inspired group of musicians, at least on this particular album.

peace