LE PARC

When I say how Tangerine Dream was quick to enter the 1980s with Force Majeure, Edgar's solo album Stuntman, and Tangram, I am obviously referring to the early '80s, more in tuned with the era perhaps up to 1983. 1985's Le Parc, their last non-soundtrack album with Johannes Schmoelling clearly shows TD full-on 1980s. I mean the era of the decade people most stereotypically associate with that decade: drum machines, digital synthesizers such as the Yamaha DX-7, that sort of thing. The sequencers have been completely ditched, I guess the band was happier having more lightweight and portable gear. The album is named Le Parc, and no surprise each song title should bear the name of certain parks around the world, except for the title track, which became the theme song for a short-lived TV series called Streethawk (imagine Airwolf if it were a motorcycle). I really don't know what to say, it screams '80s. The Streethawk theme song no doubt was inspired by Sylvester Levay's theme to Airwolf, that similar '80s electronic vibe. "Zen Garden", unsurprisingly has a rather Japanese feel to it. On some songs, I was rather surprised to hear that '70s Solina string synths among that '80s sounds. To be honest, it doesn't sound too distinct from incidental music heard on movies and television, but then the band had been scoring for quite a few films by this time. To this day, I find this just plain OK. I mean, put Le Parc up against classics from a decade before like Phaedra, Rubycon, and Ricochet and this totally crashes and burns. I hate to be so hard on the band, but this was a big reminder that, when I was around 16, at the end of the '80s when I first heard of Tangerine Dream, I failed to understand what the big deal about these guys were, because I was hearing stuff like this (or their following albums up to Optical Race) on a local public radio station. I still own the album, but this band simply fell victim to the 1980s. It's like they could have backed Phil Collins by this point. It sold tons better than Zeit, I'm sure of that.