Tangerine Dream — Catch Me If You Can OST

In the early 1980s, Tangerine Dream became synonymous with the movie soundtrack. After scoring Thief and The Keep for Michael Mann, and The Sorcerer for William Friedkin, their stock had risen to such a level that Hollywood kept calling on them to score a host of films including Firestarter, Red Heat and Near Dark. 1989s Catch Me If You Can was a movie about a young drag racer who bets on himself to win a race, in order to raise the money needed to save his school from closure. Immediately the film’s premise seems at odds with the ambient spacey electronica that Tangerine Dream had become known for, so I stepped into this one with more than a little trepidation.

The soundtrack features nineteen tracks with a run time of forty minutes. I’m not going to give a run-through of every track, especially as several of them are very short, however, I think this shouldn’t make the review any less interesting.

Firstly, the opening track is an up-tempo number that wouldn’t sound out of place on the score to a John Carpenter movie. It features some funky rock n roll type keyboard runs as well as some quieter moments, but overall, this is very different to what I was expecting. It’s all very 80s, however, it ranges from the more familiar electronic ambience we’ve come to expect from Tangerine Dream to something upbeat that sounds almost like it comes from the soundtrack to the David Hasselhoff fast car vehicle Knight Rider or Airwolf.  The key factor is that it’s largely very good, odd tracks like "Dylan Alone At Home" seem a bit odd, with some odd synthesized flute sounds that come across as twee, however when it works it really works, album opener "Dylan’s Future", "Back to the Race" or "The Kiss" prove that they can definitely do some different to what we’re used to. 

Overall, it’s an interesting album, some tracks like "The Kiss" remind me of the work Claudio Simonetti was doing around the mid to late 80s with Phenomena and Demons, and there is a John Carpenter-esque thing going on throughout, however, it’s still identifiably Tangerine Dream, with the more ambient numbers harking back to former glories such as The Keep or Sorcerer.

This new CD release from BSX Records is a limited edition of just 500 copies so grab one while you can as these will disappear very quickly. If you like 80s synth soundtracks mixed with classic Tangerine Dream, John Carpenter and a little Claudio Simonetti then you’re going to enjoy this. A more than solid album, from one of the great musical pioneers of the last 50 years, nicely packaged from a company that are really trying to bring us the goods.