Customer Reviews

Teo & Tea (Bonus Dvd) (Pal) (Hk)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

To say this is a disappointment is putting it mildly, but it took me a long while to finally appreciate and enjoy Metamorphoses, so maybe it will get better over time, much like the ugly girls and guys start looking cuter as summer camp drags into its final weeks.

It's clear that Jarre is definitely taken with Eurodance Pop, and this album is filled with more of it than ever before.

Ironically, "Fresh News" is anything but, as it's almost an homage to early 80's synth pop.

But the title track "Téo and Téa", and its accompanying DVD music video, are fun and whimsical, and it's a catchy tune.

"Beautiful Agony" seems to continue the theme, but it quickly plummets with clips of French actress Anne Parillaud making orgasmic moans and breaths throughout.

"Touch To Remember" is a softer piece that could have been wonderful. But it's riddled with a computer voice that borders on idiocy like "I-C-U-P" and "U-R-A-P-P". Seriously, you will almost think you hear it saying that, and it ruins the piece.

"OK, Do It Fast" is unique and minimalistic. It's interesting, but unmemorable.

"Partners In Crime" is the most reminscent of Jarre's more recent works on "Metamorphoses", flavored with a bit of James Bond excitement. Parts 1 and 2 are basically rocked-out variations. Should be fun to play while driving.

With "Chatterbox", Jarre pulls out some of the old Zoolook clips again and plays DJ with interesting voice sounds.

Probably one of the two most appealing tracks of the entire album is "In The Mood For You", and long time fans should enjoy it. The only disappointment is that it's similar to stuff we're already hearing from Jarre protegés. Given the rest, though, this track stands out.

With "Gossip", we're back to the toolbox of voice recordings, this time with whispers. Star Trek fans will recognize the "V-ger" styled sounds that overlay the whispers. But again, it's another unimpressive piece and makes us wonder if Jean Michel isn't just being lazy.

"Vintage" compliments the title track very well, and it's another poppie Eurodance track in the Jarre synth style.

Fans of Jarre will definitely enjoy "Melancholic Rodeo". A cool solo guitar shines as the lead voice over a lush background theme filled with lament. Really, this track's theme could have been turned into an entire album and it would have become another shining jewel in the Jarre legacy.

Finally, "Téo and Téa 4:00 AM" is merely a club remix of the title track. Nice enough, but you've heard it already.

The DVD is really an extended CD, containing all of the music tracks with different sound configuration options and the album cover as a backdrop, fun to play on your home theater and get a different aural experience on all the tracks. And there's the SD and HD versions of the title track video, which is creative and well done.

But overall, long time fans will find this album to be a disappointment. Yes, rrue fans will still want it for their collections (as did I), but that almost rewards Jean Michel's laziness. A school teacher might note, "Jean Michel's performance continues to fall below his capabilities."

I have been listening to Jarre since I first heard Equinoxe in 1980, then caught up with Oxygene I somehow missed, continued with Magnetic Fields and so on... I became a huge fan and have always been influenced by Jarre in various degrees (making electronic music is a hobby of mine). The last few albums released were not up to his standard, but were to a large degree interesting experiments. This piece, however, sounds like a mediocre, anonymous demo for a music production software or a synth workstation. It completely lacks character and while not completely dismissible as a background music, it failed to produce ANY emotions... I will give it couple of more weeks to sink in, but I don't think it will get MUCH better than this.

I admit to be fed up with Jarre the last couple of years. He did not produce new songs anymore, but remained occupied with rehashing his old songs. This new album shows us a Jarre that wants to be up to date. Some would call this music "eurodance," but it is nothing like the cheesy 80s stuff. I like the album, but I must admit that this is nothing like Jarre's music from Equinoxe or Oxygene, so that many fans will be disappointed by the musical turn that Jarre has taken with his last couple of albums.

Especially the title song "Teo & Tea", "Vintage", and "Teo & Tea 4.00 AM" have real hit potential. But there are more gems on this album. "Touch to remember" has haunting melodies. "Chatterbox" shows Jarre's legacy to Kraftwerk. "OK, Do It Fast", and "Partners in Crime I and II" have interesting breakbeat and melodic parts. More lounge-like are "Beautiful agony" (if you hear the vocals, you know what is meant by the title), "In the Mood For You", "Gossip", and "Melancholic Radio" (in my opinion the worst song of the album).

The negative part of this review is that the album is only 50 minutes long, which I find really disappointing, especially for an album that fans have been waiting for for so long.

As I said, this album does not come close to Jarre's earlier success albums. However, this album definitely is the best album he has created in years. And I definitely hope soms songs of this album will be picked up by big DJ's, like Tiësto, Ferry Corsten, Armin van Buuren, and/or Paul van Dyk for some exciting remixes.

A major disappointment. After years of not producing much new and only background music, plus some rehearsals of the same good but old stuff, he comes with an album that is both uninspired and souless. Only two songs are "ok", maybe three... "In the mood with you", "Touch to remember" and "Melancholic rodeo". The rest are so easy, deprived of emotion, cheap, and short that it is hard to believe this was made by Jarre.

So, is Jean Michel Jarre creatively dead?

Why the hell would any artist worthy of the title "Artist/Composer" want to keep making new music that sounds like what he did 40 years ago? People have some strange ideas about creativity. Jarre is one of the great composers of our age. If he wants to play around in the pop idiom, he's more than earned the right. This album, TEO & TEA, doesn't "flow" like some of his earlier albums but I don't think that was ever the intention. It's a good change of pace from what you'd normally expect from Jarre... to be fair, perhaps this doesn't contain his most memorable work but I find it works just fine for what it is.

Jean-Michel Jarre's new releases are frequently surprising, but often not in the way his audience wants to be surprised. His career-defining works Oxygene and Equinoxe got his fans hooked into a certain kind of thing: Dreamy, multi-layered wobbly synth textures that occasionally contain melodies that could be sharp-tongued as "sequels of the chicken dance, pt. 1-100".
Since that time, Jarre has been re-inventing himself often, frequently alienating more of his hardcore fans than gaining new ones.

Teo & Tea seems to be the album where Jarre finally reconciles with his "90ies techno dance children". May the techno bassdrum used in his earlier "Chronologie" have felt somewhat misplaced, may many of his remixes (even parts of Oxygene 7-13) feel quite "forced" in this respect, Teo & Tea now has Jarre display organic&natural mastery at the production of dance/disco/trance party music.
The album consists of mostly radio-oriented pop-music tracks with very unequivocal messages designed for mass-approachability. There is no "grand genius revelation" here, but Jarre's talent at layering synthesizer tracks into transparent and still coherent textures is clearly discernable.
His musical intelligence doesn't move this into the direction of IDM/Electronica, rather, the result with a few exceptions could be described as "potentially smarter than average silly trance pop".

The title track Teo&Tea itself would have been a sure No.1 single had it come out in 1999, but in 2007 it can't help appearing extremely derivative - albeit a very well delivered derivative, probably even better than the "original" :)
The video to this track is also very neat and a perfect complement to the music, however, I can not comment on the DVD version.

Still not sure about the adult female vocals on "Beautiful Agony"... would this have to be labelled as "explicit lyrics"?

Some have criticized the cheesy Speak-And-Spell voice on "Touch to Remember", but it actually did get my eyes misty for some strange reason I can not explain, and it wasn't because I was thinking about "U R A P P" when I heard it. It was somehow the voice asking "are you an angel" that was so naive an honest that it somehow instantly disarmed me.
I do admit that in one moment it did sound like "I suck / you suck" or sth... lol (I think it meant to say "I talk, you talk"... didn't it?) :) I forgive.

There are tracks that don't live up to the rest in one or the other way, the two "Partners in Crime" for example feel strangely unnecessary, or the substance-devoid "Do it fast", but it still shows that Jarre had a lot of fun making this "lightweight" album, and the fun comes across.
"In the mood for you" is a classic kind of synthesizer instrumental, and "vintage" pulls quite a few stops of "ooh... I had forgotten about these 80ies sounds...".

"Chatterbox" and "Gossip" are probably the most interesting and unique tracks on this Album - the former bending Jarre's style towards glitch/hip-hop electronica, and the latter being a mysterious sound-scape oriented ambient work.
These two tracks have the most "face value" on this album, while much of the other tracks are borderline anonymized by a somewhat outdated genre-orientation that sometimes makes them almost indistinguishable from a lot of other artists and productions.
In the details of the tracks however, you will recognize the "Jarre" in the way the synths&melodies are arranged, in the way the sounds are tweaked and combined - and also in the way things sometimes feel a bit "old-school" and clumsy.

His other newer album, "Metamorphoses" towers over this one in terms of perfect attention to details and intricacy, this one was probably produced in a much shorter time, but there is still more under the hood of "Teo & Tea" than on many comparable productions: added whit and irony, but also remnants of a 1980ies macho attitude, and JMJs signature cheese :)
If you compare it to his comparably clumsy album "Revolutions" you may appreciate the lightness of Teo&Tea even more.

Overall, I did find myself enjoying this a lot more than i expected to...

"Téo & Téa" is Jean Michel Jarre's first album of entirely new material since "Geometry of Love" (2003). As someone who enjoyed both that album and "Sessions 2000" before it, I was interested to see what new directions Jarre would take with this one. In truth it is difficult to pin down any particular style or theme running through the album: tracks range from dance to trip-hop, ambient to simply undefinable.

The album opens very strongly with the upbeat "Fresh News" followed by the excellent title track. This latter (as well as its longer mix, the bonus track "Téo & Téa 4:00 A.M.") is easily the highlight of the album, combining the quirkiness and strong melodies we have come to love from Jarre with a catchy dancefloor beat. Much further down the tracklist, "Vintage" will straightaway remind long-time Jarre fans of Chronologie 2 & 4. Similarly, the minimalist bassline on "Beautiful Agony" is heavily reminiscent of Equinoxe 6, and its sensual vocals (provided by Jarre's wife) will certainly catch your attention - although they become more wearing after the first listening.

While there are these flashes of brilliance, however, there are also a number of tracks which are either unoriginal or unimaginative, or both. Some, though not bad in themselves, come across as highly derivative: the overuse of synth strings and clap-track in "Touch to Remember" would not sound out of place as a backing for almost any hip-hop song in the charts; the ambient "In the Mood for You" sounds like any other chill-out track. Some tracks appear to be merely filler: the uninventive two-minute "Gossip" springs to mind; "Partners in Crime, Pt. 2" sounds merely like a prototype version of Pt. 1.

Opinion has been extremely polarised on this album - as it always is on any new offering by Jarre. One of the problems is clearly that while there are a number of good tracks (and one or two great ones) there are also a number of very bland or uninspiring ones (though actually few completely awful ones). To my mind it is no surprise that the most minimalist tracks are among the most forgettable, and that the more interesting ones are those with the greatest range, depth and colour in their soundscape. Such depth, after all, is what Jarre has always excelled at.

All in all, "Téo & Téa" is a real mixture and very difficult to classify. On the whole, however, I would say that it is at least a respectable album, and if it is not Jarre's best work, neither is it his worst. As a final word of warning for those considering buying the CD+DVD version, the DVD contains no special features or visual effects to complement the audio, and so unless you particularly want the 5.1 surround experience, there is a lot to be said for buying the CD-only version instead and saving your money.

Rather than do a painstakingly track by track analysis, I simply kick back and listen to JMJ's newest and enjoy his latest contribution to Eurodance and the progressive ambient movement also furthered by Nick Warren ("Paris") and Digweed's "Transitions 2". I haven't heard "Aero" but why is it no one has commented on "Sessions" 2000, especially all of the JMJ fans who seem to hunger for the good old days of JMJ's music? This is great compared to all the ho-hum noise masquerading as music out there. Let the man experiment and just enjoy what comes, get up and dance, just listen and stop nit-picking. If you want to really get picky, ask why Sony/Dreyfus doesn't release "12 Dreams of the Sun"?

I'm a die hard Jarre fan! I've not missed one album, single (or even any bootlegs) to date :-)
This album is obviously very different to Oxygen, Equinox, magnetic fields, and many of his early albums. However, the one thing that Jarre always managed to do, is to come up with weird sounds and "melody-rise" it!! Listen to what he did in e.g. Zoolook! This album is no different in that sense (though not nearly as experimental as Zoolook), this album retained the great musical ability of JMJ!!
Furthermore I would say that the album is definitely a fresh approach from him, and even though the album is more beat driven and trance, Jarre managed to come up with sounds that really sound awesome!

I personally enjoy this album a lot, and think that the album would be enjoyed by a much broader audience than just the Jarre die hard fans!

"Téo & Téa" is Jean Michel Jarre's first album of entirely new material since "Geometry of Love" (2003). As someone who enjoyed both that album and "Sessions 2000" before it, I was interested to see what new directions Jarre would take with this one. In truth it is difficult to pin down any particular style or theme running through the album: tracks range from dance to trip-hop, ambient to simply undefinable.

The album opens very strongly with the upbeat "Fresh News" followed by the excellent title track. This latter (as well as its longer mix, the bonus track "Téo & Téa 4:00 A.M.") is easily the highlight of the album, combining the quirkiness and strong melodies we have come to love from Jarre with a catchy dancefloor beat. Much further down the tracklist, "Vintage" will straightaway remind long-time Jarre fans of Chronologie 2 & 4. Similarly, the minimalist bassline on "Beautiful Agony" is heavily reminiscent of Equinoxe 6, and its sensual vocals (provided by Jarre's wife) will certainly catch your attention - although they become more wearing after the first listening.

While there are these flashes of brilliance, however, there are also a number of tracks which are either unoriginal or unimaginative, or both. Some, though not bad in themselves, come across as highly derivative: the overuse of synth strings and clap-track in "Touch to Remember" would not sound out of place as a backing for almost any hip-hop song in the charts; the ambient "In the Mood for You" sounds like any other chill-out track. Some tracks appear to be merely filler: the uninventive two-minute "Gossip" springs to mind; "Partners in Crime, Pt. 2" sounds merely like a prototype version of Pt. 1.

Opinion has been extremely polarised on this album - as it always is on any new offering by Jarre. One of the problems is clearly that while there are a number of good tracks (and one or two great ones) there are also a number of very bland or uninspiring ones (though actually few completely awful ones). To my mind it is no surprise that the most minimalist tracks are among the most forgettable, and that the more interesting ones are those with the greatest range, depth and colour in their soundscape. Such depth, after all, is what Jarre has always excelled at.

All in all, "Téo & Téa" is a real mixture and very difficult to classify. On the whole, however, I would say that it is at least a respectable album, and if it is not Jarre's best work, neither is it his worst. As a final word of warning for those considering buying the CD+DVD version, the DVD contains no special features or visual effects to complement the audio, and so unless you particularly want the 5.1 surround experience, there is a lot to be said for buying the CD-only version instead and saving your money.