Consumer Guide Album

Mike Oldfield: Tubular Bells [Virgin, 1974]
A musician with the technique and formal imagination of Terry Riley or Philip Glass can create electronic keyboard meditations worthy of hokey adjectives like "mysterious" or "majestic." The best I can come up with here is "pleasant" and "catchy." Oldfield isn't Richard Strauss or even Leonard Cohen--this is a soundtrack because that's the level at which he operates. C+