New Tangent CD Due March 3
Date: Sunday, January 27 @ 01:57:22 UTC
Topic: Album Release News


While it may not seem a good selling point, calling your new album Not As Good As The Book, with The Tangent, we know that's unlikely to be the case. And, if you get the special edition of this new release, you actually get the book, too!

Here's what InsideOut wrote about this CD: "For keyboardist/vocalist Andy Tillison, it's mainly the inconsistencies of an alleged zeitgeist that provoke him to realize his musical visions. Together with his band, The Tangent, Tillison has assigned himself the rather difficult task of creating with a successively changing line-up music which, despite all cross-references to the Seventies, still sounds topical and future-oriented. 'The idea behind the first three albums was to rediscover the styles and sounds and ambition of the 1970s progressive music scene before it was artificially replaced by record companies and the media,' he says. 'However, just because an idea is thirty years old does not mean that it is backward looking.'

With their fourth offering, the double album Not As Good As The Book, The Tangent have even gone one step further.



"Tillison: 'Our new album, while rooted in the same tradition, has a bigger palette of sounds and styles. This time we did not restrict ourselves to formulae at all, and the overall idea is having established the Tangent's basic roots, we can now develop them and do something different. It's a more live sounding record than its predecessors, and I think it rocks more than the other three.?

"With a lot of love of detail and a rich, warm sound, Not As Good As The Book has become an adventurous journey though different styles and moods, sonic colours, and dramatic arcs. The album captivates its listeners for more than 90 minutes, and despite its diversity succeeds in never losing sight of the central theme. 'The Tangent is based around songs. We may be musically ambitious and complex, but usually at the heart of each piece lies a very simple song, something that we hope most people can relate to. Sometimes they are stories, sometimes observations, sometimes sad, sometimes funny. We embellish our music both symphonically and contrapuntally, use jazz, familiar progressive rock methods, often refer to the Canterbury bands and frequently intersperse the songs with improvisation. But they are still songs first and foremost. We don't sing songs about the usual prog subjects, no hobbits, orcs or subterranean worlds, we've always sung about real things and tried to establish progressive music as something that is relevant to life in the time we live. That, above all typifies The Tangent.'

"The band are also proud to announce a renowned new addition, namely Jakko M Jakszyk, whose reputation as a brilliant guest musician is based on his work with great names such as Level 42, Robert Fripp and Gavin Harrison. Jakszyk gives the album that certain something, his contributions are the cherry on the cake, additional highlights. 'He is an amazing player who's worked with so many people. His impressive ability to play both Bob Fripp and Greg Lake's parts in the 21st Century Schizoid Band knocked our socks off. His work on the new album is prominent and vital.'

"The unusual 'The Ethernet' in particular sees Tillison, Jakszyk and their colleagues Guy Manning (acoustic instruments), Jonas Reingold (bass), Jaime Salazar (drums), Theo Travis (saxophone, flute) and guest singer Julie King, embark on exceptionally exciting paths. '"The Ethernet" is something new to us. It's a song I'm very pleased with and I don?t feel that it is as "retro" in feel as a lot of our stuff has been described. At the heart of it is a song, as usual, but we?ve used a lot of different techniques when writing it. It's as much like Thomas Dolby or Ian Brown than it is like traditional prog. But ironically perhaps, this one brings us closer to Pink Floyd and Genesis than anything we've done before. I originally described it as a cross between Peter Gabriel and Genesis.'

"An unusual album such as Not As Good As The Book naturally deserves unusual packaging, so the special edition of this double CD comes complete with a 100-page booklet and a short story with ingenious illustrations. 'It's a humorous sci-fi story about a man lost in time,' Tillison explains, 'with lots of references to progressive music and the way in which it is seen, in the past, the present and the future. It has been beautifully illustrated by French Bande Dessin? artist Antoine Ettori, and altogether the package of the special edition is a quite new and original form, an album with a novel is not something you come across every day!'"

You can pre-order this album NOW here: po90.com/tangent2008/ordering.htm

Tracklisting:

Disc One:

01. A Crises In Mid-Life
02. Lost In London 25 Years Later
03. The Ethernet
04. Celebrity Pur?e
05. Not As Good As The Book
06. A Sale Of Two Souls
07. Bat Out Of Basildon

Disc Two:

01. Four Egos, One War
02. The Full Gamut

Notes: first cover image is the slipcover of special edition; second cover image, regular CD cover; third, special edition cover (under the slipcover)

[Source: InsideOut and The Tangent websites]







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