First_Excursion
Group: Members
Posts: 280
Joined: Aug. 2012 |
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Posted: Mar. 12 2017, 06:58 |
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| Quote (larstangmark @ Mar. 11 2017, 04:21) | | Foreign Affair, Moonlight Shadow and High Places are succesful pop-songs with elaborate guitar solos, vibraphones and incantation-ish repetition. |
Agreed. Moonlight Shadow was especially great for Mike, I'm not a huge fan but it got an 80's audience to buy the album on it's strength and surely lots of those buyers actually gave the long instrumental a good listen.
In High Places and Foreign Affair really do it for me.
I remember being optimistic about the move to a side-long instrumental balanced by shorter pieces on the other side; some of which, with the right amount of strong collaboration could potentially be appealing to the masses.
I wanted it to be worthwhile for Mike to keep making great music and for the publishers to keep sending it to this backwater and that seemed like an elegant compromise.
Personally I'll gladly take a double album with four sides of manic, indulgent, uninhibited exploration; but by 1980 it obviously wasn't going to be sustainable forever; riding the ripples of the LSD revolution like that.
Think Discovery could have been a contender for "most complete" in the sense we are considering, had it stuck closer to the evolving format. Islands did revisit that approach but I agree with larstangmark, that nothing on it is really that strong.
In the end, Platinum, FMO and Crises arguably fit best into this discussion. I lean towards the dangerous rocks of FMO, but I love the brash experimentation of Platinum and the air conditioned cool of Crises. 
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