Tangerine Dream An Introduction To... CD

For a band that has released dozens of albums, an eight-song compilation really isn't sufficient as either a best-of or an introductory sampler, though the 73-minute running time is a good value for a single CD. A bigger problem with this anthology is that it offers a very thin slice of Tangerine Dream's whole tangerine, with a track apiece from their first four albums in the early '70s and four other tracks from later phases of their career. The worst problem of all is that the documentation is shoddy, failing to answer the elementary question of exactly what albums or sources from which the final four cuts are taken. That's an especially grievous sin given that this is supposed to be "an introduction" to Tangerine Dream -- what purpose does it serve if listeners new to the group, or not too familiar with the band, can't quite figure out when half of the CD was recorded? For all that, this does give newbies a fair idea of the instrumental electronic space rock (emphasis on "electronic space" rather than rock) Tangerine Dream started out with, as well as the similar but slicker, more soundtrack-ambient sounds they were doing by the 1980s. Basically, however, this package seems to have been dictated by what small part of the Tangerine Dream catalog Sanctuary was able to license, rather than a mission to provide a representative introduction to the group. ~ Richie Unterberger

Tangerine Dream: Conrad Schnitzler, Edgar Froese, Johannes Schmoelling, Klaus Schulze, Paul Haslinger, Steve Schroyder.