SONGS FROM THE HARD SHOULDER

When listening to The Tangent, I almost always get that strong Van Der Graaf Generator vibe, which is also irradiating from this album. And it's a good irradiation, if you don't mind people wearing their influences so openly on the sleeve.

The Changes, a 17 minutes plus epic, opens the proceedings with a minor key jazzy mood, great splashes of flute and then sax, and good vocals delivering the story of a gig that went bad for the band, turning more and more extravagant by the minute, also in the musical sense, with recurring choral arrangements (excellent, and of course, very VDGG inflected). Nearing the end, we get one of the sweetest treats in the album, which is a truly fantastic electric guitar solo with a very Holdsworth-type kind of flow linking the brilliant notes. This track, and The Lady Tied to the Lamp Post (with the best and more personal set of lyrics in the album) are the highlights for me, with the short track Wasted Soul (a weak attempt to emulate the "white soul" sound of the mid eighties, don't ask me why) being the lowest point.

Anyway, this only misstep cannot spoil the general brilliance of the music, specially when the two remaining tracks are pieces of real class: The GPS Vultures, an instrumental showcasing all the muscle and the subtlety in the band, and the bonus track In the Dead of Night / Tangential Aura / Reprise, which is, of course, a cover of the UK song, with their own aura interpolated. And if you guess that there may be another Holdsworthian surge here, you won't be wrong.

Excellent, but, why didn't they just drop the poppy track and make the bonus part of the regular album?