Robert Miles - Dreamland

The name Robert Miles will forever be associated with 'Children', perhaps the most universally-loved, beautiful and uplifting composition of the 20th century. That might sound like a sweeping statement, until you realise it's most probably true.

So in theory a whole album of 'dream house' from the Italian genius would be awesome. But the reality is slightly different. 'Dreamland' is essentially 80 minutes of the same dreamy piano, synth bassline and unimaginative beat. All the tracks have pretty much the same sound and structure, except 'Red Zone', a track that seems hugely exciting compared to the samey-ness of the rest.

Of course Robert Miles changed his style dramatically with his next album '23AM' and all his music released since is significantly different to the stuff on 'Dreamland', though still with depth and intelligence. 'Dreamland' is just a capsule of his style at the time.

When I bought this CD I was only familiar with the tracks "Children" and "Fable", but since I quite liked them, I decided to buy this album.


Although not exactly a bad choice, I was a bit disappointed. The problem with the tracks is that they all use the same elements: same piano, same strings, same synths... even the drums and bass sound almost the same. I know these elements more or less define the "dream house" sound Robert Miles was known for at the time of this release, and while the tracks themselves aren't bad or anything, it's just that a whole CD of the stuff gets quite boring.
The upside of having the tracks sound so alike is that the album has a very consistent dreamy/chilled atmosphere. The cheesy poppy vocals on "One & One" kind of break the atmosphere though. "Red Zone" deserves to mentioned too, since this is the only track on the album that doesn't use the piano-sound used in the other tracks, and has a bit of a proggy trance mood. Yet still it blends in nicely with rest of the tracks, which sort of proves that Miles didn't need to fill the disk with 10 clones of "Children".