Flame Dream - Out In The Dark (1981/2025)

Posted By: popsakov

Date: Sept. 20, 2025

Switzerland's best symphonic prog band of any consequence, Flame Dream released its third album, Out In The Dark, in 1981. Recorded at Patrick Moraz's legendary "Aquarius" studio in Geneva and surpassing 1979's excellent Elements, it is a classic of European progressive rock. Amazingly, in continental Europe, brilliant, classic progressive rock music was still being produced with little regard for the prevailing winds of disco, new wave and punk. Flame Dream had hit it big in Europe with release of Elements. The music on Out In The Dark continues in the same vein as on their preceding albums, with rich, keyboard heavy compositions by vocalist/wind instrument player Peter Wolf (son of the noted Swiss classical pianist and brother of classical/avant-garde composer and pianist John Wolf-Brennan) and keyboardist Roland Rockstuhl. The album is divided into the first, the "Sun Side," and the second, the "Dark Side," and, although lyrically the "Sun Side" does deal with warmer, more upbeat sentiments, the music that accompanies the lighter side of the album is, with the exception of the opening tune, "Full Moon," overall the darker of the two sides. Side two, the "Dark Side" overflows with up tempo meter and bright themes.

The music begins with "Full Moon," a cross between UK and Supertramp, and the most poppy sounding track the band will give us this time. It is followed by one of my favorite cuts, "Nocturnal Flight," five and a half minutes of absolute symphonic joy. The tune favors the late 70's style of Genesis, with keyboard work reminiscent of Tony Banks, and features a wonderful guitar solo by Hauskins. Side one ends with the brilliant title track, "Out In The Dark." Beginning with a melancholy theme, we segue into a lovely melody on Peter Wolf's flute that sounds much like the intro to Hackett's guitar solo in "Firth Of Fifth." This turns onto some of the most nimble piano lines ever recorded and the piece develops an almost Italian flair before returning to it's opening motif.

Side two begins with "Wintertime Nights," which boasts some more great Tony Banks- like keyboard work. "Strange Meeting (Part One)" is another Genesis influenced tune, moving moodily across its stark landscape and exploding into brisk lines from Ruckstuhl's synthesizer. It is chased by "Caleidoscope," a herky-jerky instrumental that bursts with syncopated keyboard and sax lines, and at times comes across as Gentle Giant-lite. The album's final track, "Strange Meeting (Part Two)," is not a separate track at all, but a continuation of "Caleidoscope" with the imposition of the two main themes from "Strange Meeting (Part One)."

This is a great album, with high caliber musicianship constantly grabbing your attention, very well conceived and developed themes and wonderful production by John Acock, who handled most of Steve Hackett's solo albums. The similarities to Genesis are, with the exception of a couple of synth solos, entirely compositional, and no one is trying to emulate the "sound" of Genesis, as many other bands have certainly done. Coming late to the game as they did, Flame Dream were, perhaps, not the most innovative band that ever was, but they carried on with true symphonic progressive rock long after many of the genres innovators had turned to pure pop sounds.

~ Tom Karr

Discogs

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Track List:

01. Full Moon [5:23]
02. Nocturnal Flight [5:34]
03. Out In The Dark [9:30]
04. Wintertime Nights [4:05]
05. Strange Meeting (Part One) [9:07]
06. Caleidoscope [5:38]
07. Strange Meeting (Part Two) [1:52]

EAC Log

Exact Audio Copy V1.8 from 15. July 2024

EAC extraction logfile from 19. September 2025, 18:23

Flame Dream / Out In The Dark

Used drive : ATAPI iHAS122 F Adapter: 1 ID: 0

Read mode : Secure
Utilize accurate stream : Yes
Defeat audio cache : Yes
Make use of C2 pointers : No

Read offset correction : 6
Overread into Lead-In and Lead-Out : No
Fill up missing offset samples with silence : Yes
Delete leading and trailing silent blocks : No
Null samples used in CRC calculations : Yes
Used interface : Native Win32 interface for Win NT & 2000
Gap handling : Appended to previous track

Used output format : User Defined Encoder
Selected bitrate : 1024 kBit/s
Quality : High
Add ID3 tag : No
Command line compressor : C:\Program Files (x86)\Exact Audio Copy\Flac\flac.exe
Additional command line options : -V -8 -T "Genre=%genre%" -T "Artist=%artist%" -T "Title=%title%" -T "Album=%albumtitle%" -T "Date=%year%" -T "Tracknumber=%tracknr%" -T "Comment=%comment%" %source%

TOC of the extracted CD

Track | Start | Length | Start sector | End sector
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––-
1 | 0:00.00 | 5:22.57 | 0 | 24206
2 | 5:22.57 | 5:33.09 | 24207 | 49190
3 | 10:55.66 | 9:29.16 | 49191 | 91881
4 | 20:25.07 | 4:04.22 | 91882 | 110203
5 | 24:29.29 | 9:06.65 | 110204 | 151218
6 | 33:36.19 | 5:37.32 | 151219 | 176525
7 | 39:13.51 | 1:51.24 | 176526 | 184874

Track 1

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Track 2

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Track 3

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Track 4

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Track 6

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Track 7

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None of the tracks are present in the AccurateRip database

No errors occurred

End of status report

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