Although Paul Haslinger's tenure in Tangerine Dream is regularly associated with a rather fast slide into irrelevance, his first album with the band is a resounding success. Underwater Sunlight is split into two sections: the first is the two part epic Song of the Whale, the second a run of four poppier tracks.If Song of the Whale doesn't quite capture the same feeling as the side-long suites TD are famous for, it certainly recreates the feeling of grandeur many felt was missing from Le Parc. It also brings the return of Edgar's electric guitar playing, which had been pretty much absent since Tangram in 1980. The two contrasting parts are expertly composed, with the first brooding and dramatic, and the second rich and uplifting. True, it's only the fierceness of the guitar solos that keeps the music from being the group's first full foray into 'new age' (the title alone makes no attempt to hide that!), but this is still a point in the band's career where they were confident enough to be able to pull off a range of different approaches and styles.The second half of the album is based around four shorter pieces with equally watery names. Each of these is more open to improvisation than anything on Le Parc, although the feeling of poppiness from that album is still very much present. Of these four, Scuba Scuba is the weakest, a somewhat forgettable mid-tempo number, whilst Ride On the Ray is the winner, with a memorable repeating synth riff and a strong guitar solo from Edgar.Overall, the album is probably the most consistent in tone since Tangram, with Schmoelling's excitable genre-swapping replaced by Haslinger's more studious focus. In the end, Underwater Sunlight surprises as being one of the strongest Tangerine Dream albums of the 1980s.