Vangelis Oceanic //FREE\\ Full Album

All except the standard CD come with a thick 176 pages booklet, full of photographs and drawings from the NASA mission, the team that made the mission happen, the planet, Greek mythological scenes and figures, as well as many never before seen photographs of Vangelis and his collaborators on this album. Also included are liner notes and words from Vangelis, Angela Gheorghiu, Scot Bolton and Stamation Krimigis. The standard CD actually comes with a link to a PDF, to enjoy the same content in digital form.

Vangelis Oceanic Full Album

Since 1994, fans of both the movie and its music had been venting their complaints and frustrations on the existing release. While it's intrinsic quality was almost exclusively hailed, some were disappointed that various important (and some not so important) musical cues from the movie that were not represented on the 1994 soundtrack release, while others thought the album's inclusion of bits of dialog from the movie did not allow the material to be fully enjoyed on its own merit. The promise of a three disc set raised expectations sky high.

'Fame' and the title track aside, 1975's ersatz soul experiment Young Americans is often placed low in both classicist and hipster Bowie top tens, languishing in 1 bins and charity shops. I know I got my copy somewhere like that, years ago; what's more unusual is that I became briefly obsessed - that repeated listening, planning cover versions kind of obsessed - with the second track, 'Win'. Sonically, it's a lush, saturated power ballad thing where the saxes (tight and funky elsewhere on the album) float and ripple on a bed of mega-reverb and strings keen like a slow disco lament; structurally, it veers between soothing grooves and anthemic DRAMA as the rhythm goes from a slinky, slow 4/4 beat in the verse to emphatic triplets and a squealing guitar in the chorus. Thematically or lyrically, the song makes no sense at all; the delivery is full of emotion but the words devoid of weight or coherence. The exhortations of the backing vocalists ("It ain't over...that's all you gotta do") can't pull us from the void at the heart of 'Win' (and, in fact, the whole album), and the more you listen to it, the less this song is about; and the less Bowie seems to know what it's about either. It doesn't stop him delivering some killer lines ("Someone like you. Should not be allowed. To start any fires...") and it doesn't stop it being beautiful, as the outro spirals lullaby-like hazily down into a couple of lazy drum breaks. Like a lot of highly produced music, 'Win's reflective surface denies full understanding, and thus it retains a strange, sad affect. Beck's almost-sampling of the track on 'Debra' does it no justice whatsoever in my opinion.Frances Morgan

If any of David Lynch's films has fallen off the radar in recent years, it's most likely 1997's Lost Highway, and I'd argue that this is in some part to do with its soundtrack album, as compiled and produced by Trent Reznor. The music in Lost Highway is more 'of its time' than in any other Lynch movie, and thus much of it hasn't aged at all well, from Marilyn Manson to Rammstein, and the film's opening track, David Bowie and Brian Eno's 'I'm Deranged'. I actually really like most of it, although I do draw the line at the Smashing Pumpkins one. Originally on Outside, Bowie's 1995 album featuring the bombastic mashup of 'Hello Spaceboy' and sundry other over-ambitious, Matrix-ish techno-metal cuts that I suspect will one day get a reappraisal but maybe not yet, 'I'm Deranged' exploits the sudden vogue for putting a vaguely drum and bass rhythm behind everything, including adverts, that hit the mainstream in the mid-1990s. Here, it powers a melancholy, mellifluous vocal line that makes me think of Billy Mackenzie on Outernational, choppy guitars, and a wildly emoting piano straight out of 'Aladdin Sane'. It's pretty silly, perhaps, but it has a momentum, a synthesised sweep and a sense of dark space that, for me, is wonderfully inseparable from the juddering, frenetic yellow lines, pale headlights, and pitch-black road to nowhere of Lost Highway's iconic opening and closing sequences.Frances Morgan 041b061a72