starfish
Group: Members
Posts: 93
Joined: June 2009 |
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Posted: July 30 2012, 12:54 |
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Right, I've now had the chance to listen to this thing.
The Good:
Yay! The songs have been remastered! If this is what we can expect from future re-releases of Crises, Five Miles Out etc, then we have a lot to look forward to.
It's also nice to have some of these tracks in 'seperated' form. For the modern stuff, it's not just fade-ins and fade-outs, but discrete tracks with proper endings. The SODE stuff is particularly welcome - hopefully this means that, at some point, we can look forward to a version of 'Top of the Morning' without all that wibbly-wobbly stuff played over the last note!
Disc Two is good, and it's nice to see the Millennium Bell get some recognition - Amber Light was always one of my favourites. Thankfully, the utterly horrid Tr3s Lunas is completely unrepresented.
The Bad:
Whatever your view of the tracklisting (I think we could all improve upon it), that's nothing compared to the rubbishness of the excerpts. 'The Lake' finishes before it even gets going, 'Crises' is reduced to that Tubular Bells rehash at the end, and god knows what the general public are going to think of the Maggie Thatcher speech in Amarok. If I was an Oldfield newbie, just discovering his music because of the Olympics, and listened to Disc 1, I'd be mightily underwhelmed.
The SODE tracks aren't anywhere near the best that album has to offer (nor is 'The Tempest', and we have three different takes on the Tubular Bells theme (the original, Sentinel, plus the end of Crises). It just makes disc one sound drab and repetitive, sadly - not the best introduction to the man's music.
For the newer fan, there are definitely better collections out there - Elements is an excellent starting place for the novice.
And for the hardcore set who have to have everything, well it's nice to hear some of these tracks without them blurring into the next song.
And for the middling fans, then all this stuff is available elsewhere, so why bother?
I sympathise with the makers of this CD - with so much material to choose from, and so many styles, and so many formats (from long-form instrumentals to pop songs), it's a challenge for even the most experienced compiler to provide a good overview of Mike's music.
Handing the job over to a novice (in the sense that Mike's never before been given free reign to make a compilation) seems, in hindsight, to have been a bad idea.
Sometimes he lets his emotional attachment to a song cloud his judgment, perhaps. He may have fond memories of making "Light + Shade", for example, but that doesn't make its tracks worthwhile inclusions, IMHO.
Oh well, what do I know?
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