Doing another skip in The Tangent discography (I do like and will own at some point The Slow Rust of Forgotten Machinery) and moving up to 2018 with Proxy. If 2015’s A Spark in the Aether was meant to be some kind of return to form (to fine if somewhat mixed results), Proxy feels more like the band I came to discover and love. Most of the team is back, and the music plays to Tillison’s strengths with two big epics and three slightly less epic though no less fun songs to really get the band back on their stride. For me this is the start of a great run, so let’s get into the weeds.

Despite skipping a few albums (I don’t own physical copies of Down and Out in Paris and London, COMM, or Le Sacre du Travail) it appears as though I’m back where I started with The Tangent. Because A Spark in the Aether, their 8th studio album, is subtitled The Music That Died Alone – Volume 2 and is purposefully position as a return to their prog roots after a few left hand turns. I can see that even if I’m not as familiar with the albums I missed – this is a prog rock album invested in the notion of prog rock: its history, its present, and its future. As such it’s a bit of a mixed bag for me – there’s stuff I really enjoy and some stuff (particularly lyrically) that distances me, as we’ll discuss below. But overall despite not being in my top tier of Tangent records, there’s plenty of good to be had, so let dive in at what is just over the halfway point of our Tangent journey.