Mike Oldfield
Hergest Ridge

The album I am about to review is not among Oldfield's most famous, the successor to "Tubular Bells" from which it inherits the pressure of the success achieved and the desire and need to compose a stretched and rarefied work closer to ambient and new age atmospheres. And it is precisely in this album that his creativity tempers and filters the impulsiveness and flashes of genius that emerged in "Tubular Bells." The result of this equation gives life to Oldfield's best album. Inspired by the landscape of Herefordshire, the album is divided into two instrumental suites.

The first is introduced by winds that begin to weave the delicate pattern on which the entire album develops, in a crescendo of instruments where the guitar with its seductive and melancholic sound stands out, sometimes following, sometimes desecrating the geometric structure of the entire album. Melodic specters that interpenetrate seamlessly somewhat like the autumnal landscapes of Wales made of soft lights, the brilliant backlight of the leaves, and the cool shadows of dusk.

The second part opens with a delicate acoustic guitar and slowly unfolds into a dreamlike universe made of almost pastoral melodies with a Folk flavor before darkening as if caught in the open countryside by a violent apocalyptic storm. And here are twenty or more guitars played in series, weaving a crooked, segmented, and claustrophobic melody that spins on itself until, when you least expect it, a warm light with dreamlike hues reappears from nowhere, concluding the album in a crescendo of orchestral embraces and minimal acoustics. The most shadowy and misunderstood album of the most inspired and creative Oldfield.