This album is simply exceptional. You get a hearty dose of a musical genius's compositional skills and vocabulary, but you don't come away feeling as though you were "taken to school"; the music is very accessible. Oldfield veers from the "long piece" album format which was the hallmark of his earliest work - the longest song on QE2 is only ten or so minutes long - but the album is cohesive and conveys a rather concise musical theme. With QE2 you have some of Mike's distinguishing trademarks. For example, the first piece, Taurus, is at times alternately mean and nice, a dichotomy evident in some of his other work. Taurus also contains some very adroit key changes which allow for contrasting degrees of musical brightness. The title track is perhaps the album's best; in fact, Mike shows daring here in dueling synthetic bagpipes against an electric guitar for a very engaging effect. Mike also uses Celtic-based melodies throughout the album as he has done during various stages of his career.