Sentinel_NZ
Group: Members
Posts: 183
Joined: June 2021 |
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Posted: June 14 2024, 17:14 |
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| Quote (Platinumpty @ June 14 2024, 06:58) | Thanks for the kind words. I'm probably one of the few Taurus II dissenters on here (but then so is MO, remember he left it off his "Two Sides" compilation). I find it lumpen, repetitive and awkward. There are bits of it I like but a lot of it is a bit of a drag. I actually prefer Music From the Balcony (  )
I did have Man on the Rain on there at first, but then it is so similar in style, instrumentation, structure and melody to Moonlight Shadow that the need for brevity made me boot it. I also considered Serpent's Dream. But that's the pain of a compilation. Inevitably you're leaving stuff off you'd include were it longer.
Still - fun to do. Maybe we could have a massive fan vote (if more people were active on here) and put the results to Universal.
Now would also be a good time for a "rarities" collection, including things like Afghan, Legend, Indian Lake and that thing he did for the Bruce Parry charity CD. Plus I'm sure Mike must have loads of reels, tapes and files of unreleased bits and pieces the archivists would adore. Take a leaf out of Neil Young's book Mike and bare all (though not in a Voyager cover way, that was a bit much). |
Taurus II is nothing but the single greatest, most inspired& enthralling, most brilliantly developed, structured, conceived, realized, complex, varied, sublime, sumptuous, perfectly flawless piece of musical composition of the whole progressive rock canon, and even all popular music (I say this in the context of a record/CD/MP3 etc collection of as many as 40,000 individual tracks, 1000s of albums across all the genres....so not cheap, one-eyed parochialism or limited knowledge and gauche hyperbole), in my opinion and compares very favorably even with the likes of Tchaikovsky's piano concertos. In particular "Sana Rosana" is Oldfield's pinnacle achievement, and certainly the strongest song (if it had been released just as a song on its own, which it could easily have been) of the 80s decade. Furthermore, the way that it echoes Taurus I and is thematically, in a sense, further reflected in and developed by Orabidoo and Mount Teidi, adds to its towering accomplishment. In the final analysis, it is difficult to find the words to do the highest works of art like this true justice. Of course Music from the Balcony is also a tremendous track, which could only have been created by the same person, and no one else.
As for Man in the Rain, it is a separate song to Moonlight Shadow, with its own brilliance and soaring magnificence, both lyrically and musically; it is in fact, to my ear, a distinctly superior tune to Moonlight Shadow; just the guitar solo puts it above almost any other song you could ever hope to hear in a lifetime. If it had come out in the 80s it woud be one of the best songs of the 80s; as it is, it is one of the finest songs of the 90s. Personally I have never understood this argument: "This thing reminds me too much of this other thing therefore I don't value it". There may be two exquisitely beautiful women who have similar features - are we going to devalue one of them for the reason that she resembles another women? Or two delicious flavours of food that have some similarities; or two splendid flowers that have a similar color and scent etc but are each wonderful in their own way. I don't agree that we should deprecate something or other because there is another similar thing like it.
As for the rarities you mentioned, it seems to me that disc two of Best of 1992-2003 already kind of covered that side of things; it includes some of the tracks indicated in your post such as Indian Lake. Between that release and the various other collections down the decades many of which feature here and there various rare and otherwise hard-o-find tidbits, I'm not sure there has been anything like enough new "rarities" since then to justify a new collection of that sort (with the exception, obviously, of the cues and so on from the VR games, which have been bootlegged as "Tr3s Lunas 2" and various other sets which are every bit at least as strong and essential as anything other album).
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