INCANTATIONS

Four albums in, and I'm surprised (and kind of saddened) by the fact that I'm struggling to really "get" these early Mike Oldfield albums. His debut, 'Tubular Bells', is one of the most iconic albums in history. With plenty of memorable musical passages, it's held up well all these years later. But following releases 'Hergest Ridge' and 'Ommadawn', which both seem to be beloved by fans, fall completely flat for me.

Don't get me wrong, I love Oldfield's music. Whether he's dabbling in rock, pop, classical, folk or electronic, or making his songs three minutes long or twenty minutes long, I've always admired many of his releases. But these early ones? I just can't seem to get into them.

This brings me to 1978's 'Incantations'. Mike's fourth studio outing. As always, I respect the living hell out of his musical prowess. Plying his craft at writing, playing and recording, Oldfield is an exceptional musician, and should be commended especially for such ambitious work at such a young age too. But the songs here all seem a bit long-winded. Basically repeating what he has done on his previous albums. Of course, there's always going to be a few bits here and there that I like, and in all fairness, this whole album is just a huge smorgasbord of nice melodies. But sadly, in my opinion, they just don't make for such engaging compositions when crammed together.

Maybe, instead of four twenty-minute songs, he should have broke them down into more tracks of shorter durations. That might have made them more easily digestible. Or maybe not. We'll never know. Either way, this album just isn't working for me. There are plenty of other Mike Oldfield records I'd rather put on, so I'll just put 'Incantations' back on the shelf where it belongs, and listen to those ones instead.

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