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.

Continue reading “The Tangent: Proxy (2018)”

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.

Continue reading “The Tangent: A Spark in the Aether (2015)”

By the time of their third album changes were afoot for The Tangent. Roine Stolt and Zoltán Csörsz were gone, replaced by Krister Jonsson (with an assist by Dan Watts) on guitar and Jaime Salazar on drums. Andy Tillison becomes even more ambitious in his scope for the band, and A Place in the Queue clocks in at over two hours. But far from suffering from some of the slow bloat of their last album, here things become more varied, more expansive, and overall more successful. There are a lot of folks who call this the band’s best album, and while I might not quite agree there, we can certainly align that this is a huge, stellar record, fixing the mistakes of the previous and aiming for heights that will come to define the band on future releases.

Continue reading “The Tangent: A Place in the Queue (2006)”

When you think about it, The Tangent is kind of the perfect name for Tillison’s ongoing musical exploration. This early in the band’s career it could be construed as a tangent to the players’ other ongoing projects (Roine Stolt certainly took it that way, as this is his last hurrah with the band), but it’s also a good indicator of the musical direction: tangential to numerous styles and genres, beholden to none. Only a short year later that use case continues to hold true with their sophomore album The World That We Drive Through. Almost a half hour longer than the debut, it’s a more ambitious, expansive offering, relying less on compact passages and segues and building them into beefier song structures. It’s a less immediate but still gratifying album – with caveats – to my ears.

Continue reading “The Tangent: The World That We Drive Through (2004)”