THE WORLD THAT WE DRIVE THROUGH

In a recent Prog Archives poll (as of May, 2008) people were asked which album by the Tangent featuring Roine Stolt they preferred, and virtually all the votes went to THE MUSIC THAT DIED ALONE, probably because Stolt is that album's dominant vocalist. Could it be that most Tangent albums are bought by Flower Kings fans? If so, I'm afraid I disagree with them; I really find it a big turn-off when the band's second album, THE WORLD WE DRIVE THROUGH, opens and we're confronted with Stolt's overpowering, mid-Atlantic, quasi-dramatic vocals. 'In her heart there's an empty spaze.' 'Our planet's in a mezz.' No thanks, Roine - I actually prefer Andy Tillison's singing!

At least when Andy writes himself a proper melody, which he certainly did for the 13-minute title tune (the fourth track on THE WORLD...): it sounds very tender, features sensitive sax playing by Theo Travis, and has a splendid instrumental middle bit with solos on moog, sax and guitar... it's easily one of the loveliest symphonic prog songs to come out of anywhere in the past ten years.

For me, the problem lies with the remainder of this album. Oh, once you can get past Roine's lead vocals, that opening track ('The Winning Game') is not too terrible really, with its Wakemanesque Moog and Hammond organ solos, and with the truly gorgeous guitar solo Stolt provides for the finale (even if that same finale gets a little spoiled by a totally superfluous Burt Bacharach quotation). The second tune ('Skipping the Distance') opens heavy-handedly, but to my delight it also features Jimmy Hastings-style flute, as well as wordless vocals inspired by the Northettes. The third track, 'Photosynthesis', is a charming ballad with elegant piano playing, some mellotron and sax.

But 'A Gap in the Night', the album's most ambitious track (an 18 minute 'epic') totally spoils the mood by being virtually tuneless and, above all, WHINY. It seems that virtually any Tangent album you can think of is about somebody's midlife crisis. Once we had dreams but we lost them in the dull daily grind, switch on the television and you see nothing but greed, we're totally lost in the Scary Big City... O.K., I get the picture, but why bang on about such things for a full eighteen minutes, with plenty of sudden tempo changes but a horrible dearth of real tunes? When the Tangent's like THIS, I pray for Andy T. to shut up... It's true that his keyboard solos and Guy Manning's acoustic guitar bring occasional relief, but no! This is no way to write an epic.

As a bonus, the band offer us a 14-minute synthesizer improv in the vein of Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream. I'm afraid I never fell for this kind of music, so in my view this is 14 minutes wasted.

Final verdict: A mixed bag. Let's give it three and half stars, since they tried hard, and the good tunes (particularly tracks 3 and 4) are really worth it.