TANGRAM

Tangram was the easiest album released at that time by Tangerine Dream. The suite is a mixture of the usual TD's square waves, but with some sounds and rhythms that seem borrowed from Mike Oldfield and Jean Michel Jarre (in particular the last 5 minutes of Set 1).

I don't really mean that Froese & C have really borrowed anything. With electronic music, as it happened in the 80s, once all the keyboardists buy a Yamaha DX7, all their music sounds similar...

So forget completely the Pink period. This album sounds more "mainstream" also respect to Ricochet or Stratosfear, but it's not a mess. The music inside is good, relaxing and evocative. Well, it's closer to new age than to psychedelia, but this is the way that the band has started to follow since Phaedra and it's witnessed by the number of movie soundtracks that they were actually about to make.

Of the two sides, Tangram Set 2 is more spacey, with parts that remind to Vangelis instead of reminding to Jarre. What is missing is the repetitivity. Without repetitions the music is not as hypnotic as on the previous albums.

Thinking to fans, I don't think the reactions to this album have been very good, but in the long term this album is still actual while things like "Zeit" are a bit outdated,

I can still hear some references to the old Pink Floyd here and there, specially in Set 2 where the noisy and spacey minutes can be related to Saucerful of Secrets and to On The Run.

Even if the hard fans of the early TD were surely disappointed, I think this is one of their best albums. Being accessible to everybody can mean being more commercial, but being commercial doesn't always mean being bad. The music inside is as good as some of the best Vangelis or Oldfield's albums, just to make a comparison. 4.5 stars for me.