c o n r a d

You can tell that The Tangent are an English progressive rock group. You can tell they're English because they chose the wry, self-mocking title Not as Good as the Book for their fourth album. You can tell they're a progressive rock band because along with the album, Andy Tillison penned an accompanying novella for the album to be not as good as. Ironically, though not unexpectedly, the album is in fact better than the book. Musically, this album is similar in a lot of ways to A Place in the Queue, with little effort made to disguise the band's influences. I happened to come across Andy Tillison writing about these influences recently, which helped put things into perspective for me. He said that he is not "retro-prog" in terms of trying to recreate the sound of progressive rock's golden age; instead, he looks to the mid- to late seventies for his influences, just before prog disappeared from England. In this way, he sees The Tangent taking off from where bands like UK left off. My reservation about The Tangent's approach is that rather than taking their influences and blending them smoothly together to create a new sound, they keep them in distinct packages. The result is that the album sounds a little unfocused overall. One of the most obvious influences here is Pink Floyd circa The Wall. "The Full Gamut" begins with Andy Tillison singing in the style Roger Waters adopts when he really wants to annoy me, and I half expect him to mention "a little black book with my poems in." The vocals at the start of this track are one of the few places where Tillison's voice actively grates on me, as I am usually quite happy with his voice. I am genuinely amazed that the first time he sings the word "infinity" is so bad. Surely they must have realised and tried to re-record that bit? So much for the criticism; I would not want to give the impression that I dislike this album, because I do enjoy listening to it. There are two major strengths to Not as Good as the Book. Lyrically, it is very strong and genuinely engaging, and this is probably helped by Tillison's clear but warm diction. Songs such as "Crisis in Mid-life" and the rocker for the aging biker, "Bat Out of Basildon," tickle my funny bone as I am fast approaching forty. The other strength is the ability to churn out strong hooks and riffs, an area where many modern prog bands fall short. At a little under 100 pages, some mention should be made of the accompanying novella. It is a semi-autobiographical book set in 90724 AD after a mysterious accident destroyed all life on planet Earth at the beginning of the 21st century. Amusing at times, I found it generally engaging, and vaguely reminiscent of a Ben Elton novel (although in place of one of Elton's usual soap boxes, the main theme here is progressive rock). Despite the fact that the novel fell down a little towards the end, and the explanation for the survival of humanity is beyond implausible, it's still worth the two-hour investment of time. The only thing is that one should have a copy of Relayer close to hand, because you'll want to play it about two thirds of the way through the book. As a package, this has the danger of being considered as prog gazing at its own navel. Fans of A Place in the Queue should not be disappointed, however, but will experience a moment of cognitive dissonance when reading page 55 of the novella. The album may revel in its excess and unapologetic middle-agedness, yet succeeds because the basics of good songwriting are well attended to. review by Conrad Leviston — 8-26-08 —