Mike Oldfield – Tubular Bells II

Description

Released in 1973, Mike Oldfield’s debut album–a single composition, loosely stringing together a sequence of musical motifs–managed to sell in excess of 16 million copies, effectively kick-starting the Virgin Records empire and bringing its creator, then just twenty years old, a level of critical and commercial success he would never achieve again. Little wonder that he should choose, years later, to revisit his most famous work–though inevitably, this time the stakes were much higher. Good thing, then, that he took so few risks. Like its predecessor, the album unveils a series of musical tableaux, though this time without the slightest pretence of actual thematic development: it’s less a single, unified piece, than a medley of pretty folk-rock instrumentals. The mood sits somewhere between foggy Celtic mysticism and pastoral elegy, occasionally pausing for a moment of unexpected light relief (the bizarre whimsy of “Altered State”). Unlike the original, however, it sustains its pleasures more or less evenly across the entire composition.