Progressive Rock
The Tangent release “Was” on Friday 2 October through White Knight Records. It is the fourteenth studio album by Andy Tillison’s band, runs across two CDs and lasts a hundred minutes and forty-six seconds. The deluxe edition adds a third disc of pieces that didn’t make the record and a twenty-four-page booklet.
The first disc is three long pieces with lyrics: “Was”, “Follow the River” and “Was Not”. The second is a near-wordless suite, “La Suite Ce qu’était”, with its movements titled in French: “L’Aperitif”, “Steak de chevreuil et Le Fermier”, “Danse”, “La Route côtière”, “Multi partisanisme” and “Laisses moi chanter”. Tillison says he wrote the same story twice: “So what I did here was try to tell the story twice. Once with lyrics (CD 1) and once without lyrics (CD 2).”
John Jowitt takes Jonas Reingold’s place on bass, and Tillison says he did not simply reproduce the parts: “He did not simply replay Jonas’ parts but created new ones, and that had to trickle down into the rest of the piece and the rest of the instruments.” The rest are Luke Machin on guitars, who also mixed and produced the sung disc, Theo Travis on wind, Steve Roberts on drums and Rob Groucutt on keyboards, which puts two keyboard players back in the band, Tillison and him.
The suite starts from the “Five Bridges Suite” Keith Emerson made with The Nice, an orchestra-and-rock-band hybrid Tillison describes as orphaned: “Almost musical orphans, unloved by critics and fans alike, curiosities.” Emerson’s title came from the bridges over the Tyne; there are seven of them now rather than five, and Tillison uses that to explain that his version adds, he says, sixty years of music that didn’t exist back then.
The drums for these hundred minutes were recorded in the dressing room at the home of Tillison’s partner. The band has already played parts of it live: on 18 September at the Poppodium Boerderij in Zoetermeer and on the 19th at the Cacaofabriek in Helmond.
Text by Guillem Cardós