An Excellent Recording
Ratty Mouse | USA | 07/10/2009
(4 out of 5 stars)
"Tangerine Dream's latest release, Chandra, is a welcome addition to their musical heritage. There are just enough new sounds in this recording to make you feel the typical excitement that comes with a new Tangerine Dream album. If you enjoy the ongoing Atomic Seasons series of albums, you will certainly enjoy Chandra. (Verses Of A Sisong has some excellent sequencing!)"
Bitty (and possibly not exactly what it professes to be)
Steve Benner | Lancaster, UK | 04/16/2010
(3 out of 5 stars)
"The subtitle of Tangerine Dream's 2009 studio release "Chandra: The Phantom Ferry - Part 1" suggests there is more of this work to come. I suspect that that is more of a marketing ploy than any musical or artistic fact. As it stands, this disc is largely a series of variations on a (fairly uninspiring) theme; most of the strongest music appears on the first half of the disc, culminating in the 'The Dance Without Dancers' which is a strong and moody mock-orchestral ballad with a soaring solo line and which (unlike much of the rest) undergoes at least a little musical development. Beyond this track, the music settles into run-of-the-mill padding, as with so much of Edgar Freose's solo music. For make no mistake, this album is very much an Edgar Froese solo disc and actually sounds to my ears to have been a long time in its creation, reminding me of nothing more strongly than his "Pinnacles" album from 1983 with which I swear it shares some of the same musical ideas. Many of the voices and treatments (especially vocoder use) sound to date from that era also, albeit freshened up and heavily over-dubbed in places. This feeling is further reinforced by the otherwise inexplicable inclusion of a seemingly out of place bolt-on rehash of an old Froese solo track, 'Moonlight on a Crawler Lane', here retitled 'Silence on a Crawler Lane', which would seem to have no connection to the supposed science fiction "story" behind the album and comes across as nothing so much as a filler to make up the running time to a still paltry 58 minutes.
As a solo Froese album, this is stronger than many but will, I think, fall well short of most fans' expectations of the Tangerine Dream group marque."
