Prog For A Sunday Night - The Tangent

PROGgers delight. No Posts yet for this group, so let me introduce them to you. These guys are really good. Their new CD is coming out soon. Here's a taste of what to expect. These are long tracks, but plenty of wonderful music to enjoy in each one.

Where Are They Now

Perdu Dans Paris

Paroxetine - 20mg/The Company Car

From MVRemix Rock:

Down And Out In London And Paris, their latest of five studio releases to date, sees prog rock band The Tangent concentrate more than ever before on their artistic expressiveness. "Our new album is a 100 per cent musical project. Where the previous album, Not As Good As The Book, was this whole multimedia thing with illustrations and science fiction novel, this one is about five pieces of music on a single CD," keyboardist/guitarist/vocalist Andy Tillison points out. "In terms of format, it's more like our very first album, kicking off with a 19-minute piece which I am sure fans of the band's prog stuff are going to like. Hopefully a lot!"

Tillison is referring to 'Where Are They Now?', an expansive number in terms of playing time and style with an unusual lyrical idea: it's made up of little stories about the characters The Tangent have sung about before and brings their stories up to date. Like a kind of thread which runs almost invisibly through the whole history of this British band. The track 'The Company Car' is by no means less imposing, showing Tillison's influences from one of his favourite artists of all time, Joni Mitchell: "The Joni Mitchell influence is not typical for us. But it all does actually sound like The Tangent, which satisfies us that we can do some different stuff and still sound like ourselves." The album finishes off with the most complex number The Tangent have ever written, a Canterbury-style song called 'Ethanol Hat Nail'.

Remains the question to be answered what relationship Down And Out In London And Paris has with George Orwell's novel of the same name and whether - as one may be tempted to assume in view of this title - The Tangent's latest release is in fact a concept album. "It's not a concept album, although, as usual, there are themes that re-occur during the course of the recording," Tillison explains. "There's a song called 'Paroxetine 20mg' that looks at life through the eyes of someone on prescription drugs who feels rather empty, there's 'Where Are They Now', which ties together characters from earlier songs, and there's 'Ethanol Hat Nail', which asks the question: 'Now that we have so much music instantly available to us, do we value it as much as we used to?' The album has nothing to do with the novel by Orwell at all, other than the conscious borrowing of his title. There are two songs on the album about poverty, one set in Paris, one set in London. It's as simple as that. Our use of the title is simply a pun, I suppose."