Slow Dance

Album Review

Mike Oldfield, watch out. This all-instrumental album, consisting of two long pieces ("Slow Dance Parts 1 and 2") that mix new age sounds with rock, crosses into territory staked out most successfully by the tubular bell-ringer, and comes off as sort of Windham Hill with a beat. This material features clarinet, oboe, flute, trumpet, harp, and percussion as well as guitar, and it does sort of resemble the spacy synthesizer interludes and bridges found as parts of the longer pieces on Genesis's progressive-era albums. It isn't as vacuous as mere "ambient" sound, and some of the shifts in beat and tone are bracing and surprising, but Slow Dance also takes a long time to get where it's going.