Seventh album from progressive-rockers The Tangent, featuring a prog-lovers dream line-up that includes Gavin Harrison (Porcupine Tree), Theo Travis (Steven Wilson Band), Jonas Reingold (The Flower Kings), Jakko M Jakszyk and David Longdon (Big Big Train).

Down And Out In London And Paris, their latest of five studio releases to date, sees prog rock band The Tangent concentrate more than ever before on their artistic expressiveness. “Our new album is a 100 per cent musical project. Where the previous album, Not As Good As The Book, was this whole multimedia thing with illustrations and science fiction novel, this one is about five pieces of music on a single CD,” keyboardist/guitarist/vocalist Andy Tillison points out. “In terms of format, it’s more like our very first album, kicking off with a 19-minute piece which I am sure fans of the band’s prog stuff are going to like. Hopefully a lot!”

Tillison is referring to ‘Where Are They Now?’, an expansive number in terms of playing time and style with an unusual lyrical idea: it’s made up of little stories about the characters The Tangent have sung about before and brings their stories up to date. Like a kind of thread which runs almost invisibly through the whole history of this British band. The track ‘The Company Car’ is by no means less imposing, showing Tillison’s influences from one of his favourite artists of all time, Joni Mitchell: “The Joni Mitchell influence is not typical for us. But it all does actually sound like The Tangent, which satisfies us that we can do some different stuff and still sound like ourselves.” The album finishes off with the most complex number The Tangent have ever written, a Canterbury-style song called ‘Ethanol Hat Nail’.

There have been line-up changes again since the previous album, Not As Good As The Book: Jaime Jalazar and Jonas Reingold have left the fold, so now The Tangent consists, along with Tillison, guitarist Guy Manning and saxophonist/flutist Theo Travis, of drummer Paul Burgess and bassist Jonathan Barrett. “For the first time since 2003, all the members of the Tangent are English,” Till.......
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