NOT AS GOOD AS THE BOOK

NOT AS GOOD AS THE BANDS NAMED IN THE BOOK.

In the illustrated booklet which accompanies this CD (at least in the Luxury Edition) band leader Andy Tillison thanks Dave, Roger, Rick, Nick, Syd, Chick, Stanley, Lenny, Bill, Al and a whole range of other worthies.

Andy is STILL trying to make albums with the range of A PASSION PLAY or TOPOGRAPHIC OCEANS, and it must be said: this, his latest attempt, is full of goodies. There's an enormous amount of exhilerating (but usually rather brief) keyboard solos - too many to count. My favourites are the ones where Andy plays the same kind of mad moog (or is it a modern copy?) as Rick Wakeman did on 'Sir Gawain and the Black Knight'. Guy Manning's acoustic-guitar-and-mandolin intervals are a delight too; you almost expect him to start singing about hares who've lost their spectacles... And lead guitarist Jakko M Jakszyk is a major acquisition for the band: a Holdsworth disciple, his solos are moments of sheer delight.

And yet this album falls flat on its back. One of the main reasons can be detected in the title of the opening track. 'A Crisis in Midlife': hey, wait a sec, isn't that what ALL Tangent albums have been about? By now, their message is growing mighty stale, and Tillison's never-ending attempts to set grumpy old man's thoughts to music have started sounding monotonous, whiny and lugubrious. Don't you realise, Andy, that if you want to make dark or pessimistic music, you still need jokes and poetic images - not an endless blog full of complaints? 'Running round in circles from the cradle to the grave' you sing, and it may be that's the way you see life, but an almost total absence of memorable melodies doth NOT a convincing album make, and since you're not a particularly gifted vocalist, why can't you SHUT UP and just let your keyboards speak?

Only on the final track, 'The Full Gamut', do real passion and anguish shine through for a while - though even that track (which started off so beautifully) soon gets ruined by a dispiriting Dead Sea of words which drag on and on. The Tangent will need a complete change of tack if they want to get out of the doldrums.