Re-Mastered & Bonus Track 'Force Majeure' was their big breakthrough album in 1979, their thirteenth album altogether, and second for Richard Branson's Virgin Record label. The Virgin team had already had enormous success by taking a chance and releasing Michael Oldfield's 'Tubular Bells' to Platinum sales worldwide, after all the major labels would not touch it. So Virgin and Tangerine Dream made very suitable partners. The first album released on Virgin had been the controversial 'Cyclone' album, when the Band had played more like a traditional Rock band including vocals whilst forsaking some of the sweeping synthesizers and ambient sounds, much to the despair of their fans. But it only made for a quick re-think and vocalist Steve Joliffe had left the band by the time they went back into the studio. The spacey Tangerine Dream sound was back, but better than ever, with even more adventurous effects and more structure to the songs. If songs is what you call these pieces of music. The shortest piece clocks in at seven minutes and twenty one seconds, while the opening title track is a massive eighteen and a half minutes. It opens the album in grand style, keyboards come sweeping in after the opening theme, building to a crashing climax with all instruments joining in one by one, layer upon layer, before settling down when the opening theme is reintroduced on acoustic guitar and the music takes of again at a more manageable pace. A grand piano takes you off on one of Tangerine's musical journeys into the unknown. Soon Edgar Froese's electric guitar comes into duel with the piano before jumping off at a different tangent, before being brought back into the song by the piano, allowing the keyboards to make themselves heard. So at ten minutes along you are finally into the real meat of the music. As the music takes a second to pause at the eleven minute mark, a ghost train huffs and puffs its way across your speakers, taking you into a far more sinister area of the Tangerine Dream mind, where the sounds of the mellotron, VCS3, organ, e-piano, synthesizers, and flute leave you with a feeling of being watched, whilst in the dark the sounds, emanating from the band, whisk from speaker to speaker. However, just before it gets too weird the keyboards come back in with the main theme of the song and before you know it, you are back in the musical sunshine, and all of the loose ends of the instruments tie together to bring the music to a gloriously satisfying conclusion.
