Progressive Rock
White Knight Records · 2 October 2026
The track that opens “Was” runs twenty-two minutes and eight seconds, and for the first three of them nobody sings: there is an orchestration with Theo Travis’ flute and clarinet out front, and the first voice you hear is a spoken one. Andy Tillison does not start singing until five and a half minutes in, and by then the piece has already crossed a symphonic stretch, a jazz one with a guitar solo from Luke Machin kept at half volume, and a return to the orchestra. In the Vietnam passage the Hammond and the riff behind it stand an inch away from Deep Purple, and it is the only moment on the record where the band plays over the narration.
This is The Tangent’s fourteenth studio album and the first with John Jowitt on bass, taking the place of Jonas Reingold. The rest of the line-up is Machin on guitars — he also mixes and produces the sung disc — Travis on winds, Steve Roberts on drums and Rob Groucutt on keyboards, which gives the band two keyboard players again. Jowitt does not simply replay Reingold’s lines, and you hear it the moment the full band comes in: the bass carries a melody of its own, before the vocal arrives.
The first disc is completed by “Follow The River” (4:55), a piece of Yorkshire funk that breaks the tone of the opener, and “Was Not” (20:48). The lyric of the title track is an inventory of 1973 — the television, the parents’ cigarettes, Tolkien, Rush’s “By-Tor and the Snow Dog” — and a boy asking his father what Vietnam is.
The second disc is “La Suite Ce qu’était”, six almost wordless movements with French titles, from “L’Aperitif” (6:23) to the fifteen minutes and forty-four seconds of “Multi partisanisme”. The starting point Tillison acknowledges is the “Five Bridges Suite” by Keith Emerson and The Nice, that hybrid of orchestra and rock band left orphaned by critics and audience alike, and the reference holds up: the suite works with orchestral blocks and big-band sections that seventies prog stopped using.
The idea holding the package together — two discs telling the same story, one with words and one without — is more a claim by the author than a listening instruction: the titles of the six movements point to nothing on the first disc, and nothing says which stretch answers which. Heard separately, both discs stand up; heard as a single work, the second asks for a piece of reconstruction the package does not help with. And one decision does not help either: the three news bulletins inserted into the title track say out loud what the music had already placed.
Rating: 8.8/10
Text by Guillem Cardós