larstangmark
Group: Members
Posts: 1759
Joined: Mar. 2005 |
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Posted: Oct. 09 2006, 09:06 |
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| Quote (Alan D @ Oct. 09 2006, 02:18) | | Quote (larstangmark @ Oct. 08 2006, 23:29) | | It's a newage easy listening album, and that was the last thing I expected from Mike |
Well, as long as I've been listening to Mike Oldfield (i.e since about 1979) there have been substantial numbers of people who've described his music as 'musak'; 'musical wallpaper'; and, later, 'new age'. None of them was right. They were all the kind of comments made by people who hadn't found a way into the music, and therefore assumed that the only way to 'use' it was to play it in the background and effectively ignore it.
TSODE is no exception. It isn't 'easy listening', nor is it 'new age'. It's Mike Oldfield exploring (at that time, for him) a new kind of musical expression. He really is exploring, and the music is very rich. I don't use it as background music - when I play it, I invariably listen with concentration and full engagement, and I find it rewards that degree of focus. It's full of drama and incident - and these are not normally qualities possessed either by new age or by easy-listening music.
But obviously it won't work for everyone; it's not to everyone's taste. I can readily understand why some might dislike it. But that doesn't mean it can be dismissed as 'easy listening'. To say that is, I think, to make the same mistake as many people have done with regard to the whole of Mike's oeuvre. |
Alan, even though we don't agree on the qualities of TSODE, I hope you agree that it was a departure and I think it's only understandable that the album alienated a portion of Mike's fans at the time. Don't you?
Anyway, I feel I have to expand a bit more;
Even when Mike did chart pop (as in Earth Moving), there were unusual twists in the arrangements and always a chord change or two that takes you by surprise. This is what I lack in TSODE. Sure, some of the sonic textures are impressive, but that's not enough. It's the same kind of "deep" but ultimately shallow soundscapes that might appeal to fans of Jarre, Vangelis, Kitaro and propably Yanni. Mike's hinted at it before, but here is the full transformation.
TSODE is the first Mike Oldfield record that does not contain one bit of rock music (Killing Fields excepted of course), and as I see it, one of Mike's qualities is that he's a rock guitarist in denial.
I don't know how to explain it better. I bought Earth Moving and Islands upon their respective release dates and was somewhat disappointed, but there were glimpses of the old Mike which made the purchase worthwhile.
With TSODE I felt totally indifferent to the music. And I have trouble getting into the music ("...giving it a chance") when it contained so many things I truly dislike; glitzy synth pads, overuse of reverb on guitars, badly mixed drum loops, ethnic chants (which was outright populist at the time), song titles that sound like quotes from tourist brochures, sampled dialogue from space travels etc.
As much as a loathe the term, TSODE has an air of political correctness about it that I find slightly nauseating. It was as if it was conceived specially for the opening of the olympics or something.
The good side of this is that things could only get better - and I think TBIII (for example) was a bit of a return to form, which I propably wouldn't have thought if it was released right after TBII.
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"There are twelve people in the world, the rest are paste"
Mark E Smith
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). The experience he had in the style of music he devised entirely on his own was kind of bogged down by the attitude of the guy who's impressed with Windows XP because of how smooth the menus and windows look like (if you get what I mean with this idiotic obscure analogy, 
).
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