1980 is about on par with 1979 in terms of progressive rock's "progress," meaning that there isn't much progress at all. You get a few decent-but-inessential releases from prog A-listers like Yes (Drama) and Jethro Tull (A) that skew toward pop; Rush's Permanent Waves (which is essential, by the way) is practically radio pop compared to their '70s output. You also get a handful of solo records from some former members of prog A-lister bands, such as Peter Gabriel (Peter Gabriel, aka Melt, aka the melty-face album), Steve Hackett (Defector), and Jon Anderson (Song of Seven)—and the ones of those worth listening to are the ones that aren't prog, most notably Gabriel's forward-thinking record. We also get a few classic bands biting the dust, most notably Gentle Giant (probably the best British prog band I wasn't able to cover in this series during the '70s)—R.I.P., fellas. Progressive rock is still very much in that awkward limbo stage it was in 1979, and it probably will be about the same until the release of Marillion's Script for a Jester's Tear in 1983. So we've got a few limbo years left yet.
In light of that, I'm using these down years as an opportunity to catch up with a few bands I didn't have a chance to hit during the pretty stacked run of the early-to-mid '70s. Up today: Tangerine Dream and their 1980 release Tangram.
If I had covered Tangerine Dream back during their mid-'70s artistic peak, I would have likely discussed them in the context of "krautrock," a slightly demeaning term created by the British press[1] for the loose confederation of bands in Germany who fused experimental music with rock instrumentation in a sort of parallel evolution with the mostly British progressive rock movement. I'm talking groups like Kraftwerk and Faust and Can and Popol Vuh, who are responsible for some of the most interesting records of the era. Krautrock isn't usually labeled progressive rock, partially because of the British implications of the "prog" label but mostly because krautrock was always viewed by the press as much cooler than the fey, flamboyant progressive rock of the UK. Albums like Tago Mago and In Den Gärten Pharaos are brooding and alien experiences filled with bizarre sounds and unconventional structures—not really all that different from the best of British prog's output, but largely free from the foot-in-mouth syndrome that accompanied the sometimes-goofy lyrics and concepts of LPs like Close to the Edge and Tarkus, or at least obscured by the language barrier. And there certainly were no capes.[2]
Anyway, Tangerine Dream, a group out of Berlin, is part and parcel of Krautrock in the mid-'70s; their early albums like Zeit (1972) and Atem (1973) have all spaced-out improvisation and the uncompromising weirdness of the albums by Can or Neu! Then two pretty major things happened. The first of these is that Tangerine Dream signed to Virgin Records, a British label that gave the band exponentially more exposure in the UK. The second is that they got a Moog sequencer. Their next album, 1974's Phaedra, isn't a huge change compared to their previous records (it's still comprised of lengthy instrumental improvisations, it still has a kind of spacey sound, etc.), but what's new is evident: a pulsing bass sound driving these compositions forward—the sound of the sequencer. I don't know if the band came by the sequencer because of their new Virgin connections, but it seems a pretty nifty coincidence that the band's first album recorded in the UK and financed by a UK label is also their first using a piece of equipment made by the company perhaps most responsible (alongside Mellotronics) for the British progressive rock sound. Anyway, the long and short of this is that in the procession of albums Tangerine Dream released on Virgin over the next half decade, the band sounds decreasingly like krautrock and increasingly like an instrumental version of British prog, right up up to their 1978 album Cyclone, which even has vocals and is pretty much just British prog by a handful of expatriated Germans [3].
So it's no surprise that by the time Tangram rolls around two years later, the sound is still pretty much the same, only this time having returned to solely instrumental compositions. Taken from one perspective, Tangram's two sides—each a single, roughly 20-minute composition—are instrumental progressive rock in the same sense that some modern DJ music is considered "instrumental hip-hop," the excision of vocals taking away many of the hooks and verse-chorus structures and leaving instead compositions that feel like the genre boiled down to its most basic vibe. In progressive rock's case, that vibe consists of heavily processed keyboards, guitars, and electronic percussion forming dramatic crescendos over long, atmospheric passages full of little melodic twists from the guitar and keyboard.
You would be forgiven for identifying the first few minutes of Tangram as the opening to a long composition by Yes or Emerson, Lake & Palmer, because that's precisely the feel here; famously, compositions like "Close to the Edge" open with long instrumental passages before their lyrics kick in, and Tangram's opening eight minutes have this strange quality of seeming exactly like one of those long instrumental passages, only instead of climaxing and then moving on to a vocal part, it then skips to a little melodic bridge that another prog band may have used as a transition between vocal sections. This is then followed by an atmospheric, keyboard-heavy passage that builds again in a way that would traditionally signal a move toward an explosive vocal passage, this passage peaks and then fades off into a synth-y outro that repeats some of the melodic motifs from the previous 19 minutes. I think you get the picture, and Side Two is a lot of the same (though a little spacier). It's a curious case of progressive rock Jenga, cutting out all the vocal sections and instead constructing a suite out of all the connective tissues remaining. And the results are... a little generic? I enjoy Tangram for what it is, and it's a pleasant-enough way to spend 41 minutes, but I suppose the risk of boiling down a genre to its most basic vibe is that the bits you boil off may actually be what gives the music personality. Taken from the perspective of someone interested in the intersection of progressive rock and krautrock that a lot of Tangerine Dream's '70s output represents, Tangram builds for itself a frustrating centrism between the two: free of the go-for-broke otherworldliness that makes a lot of krautrock so compelling, and lacking the conceptual spark that can give prog its hair-brained charm. I know a lot of people (including myself) like to read progressive rock's lyrics with an eye for mockery, but Tangram is pretty strong evidence for those lyrics being essential to progressive rock's structure, because without them here, Tangram is kind of a boneless chicken breast of an album, flabby and shapeless, and without the stronger krautrock flourishes of an album like Phaedra, there isn't a whole lot to hang that shapelessness on. Again, it's not that Tangram is "bad"; it is just noticeably missing something.
There's another perspective you can view Tangram from, and that's a futurist one. Because for as much as the album recycles the pieces of the previous decade, it also inescapably has the sound of an album from the 1980s, which is sort of impressive, given that it just barely exists at the birth of that decade. The key is the exact same piece of equipment that gave Tangerine Dream their doorway into British prog: the sequencer. I didn't mention it earlier, but in addition to being part of the progressive rock and krautrock conversations, Tangerine Dream are often considered early pioneers in the commercial expansion of electronic music, and the sequencer is a cornerstone of what would eventually become a whole host of electronic music genres, most notably the explosions of house and techno in the '80s. So there's an extent to which Tangerine Dream has been a band of futurists since Phaedra. But the production on Tangram feels like a dedicated step toward a purely '80s sound in a way that none of their album since Phaedra has, and this is probably due to a lot of little factors: the keyboards become just a little more twinkly, the guitars become just a little less grounded in low-end frequencies, the percussion just a little bit more sampled. Sure, it has the structural pieces of '70s prog, but it sounds like the '80s.
Taking the long view, this development isn't particularly surprising. In general, the krautrock bands that survived the '70s (Kraftwerk, most notably) tended to push closer and closer toward the electronic music that would define a lot of that '80s sound, and Tangerine Dream in particular was a band that not only embraced but often defined the '80s aural aesthetic, most famously with their film score work—their 1981 soundtrack for Thief, the debut film from director Michael Mann (possibly the preeminent architect for the neon-soaked '80s cinematic aesthetic), is my pick for the most '80s film soundtrack of all time. But you don't get Thief without first taking those early steps in that direction with Tangram a year prior. With the benefit of hindsight, these new sounds are all a little cheesy in the same way that the rocket-ship dreams of the 1950s or the steampunk fantasies of the late 19th century are; there's always something a little kitsch about the abandoned future visions of bygone eras. But on the other hand, there's something magnetic about those visions as well, all the more so because they never truly came to pass, and the same goes for the neon, synthy '80s futurism that Tangram begins to embody. It's no accident that the 2010s have seen a mass reclaiming of this discarded '80s flotsam—it's cheesy, sure, but it's also cool.
Tangram isn't all the way there yet, so it lacks the purer embodiment of that vision that the Thief soundtrack would eventually provide. But standing with one foot in the previous decade and the other in the new decade gives Tangram an evolutionary significance that its sort of generic music belies. More so than a lot of music I've covered in this series, Tangram is positioned at the nexus point of a lot of the threads of the past and the future. Even if I'm just sticking with the prog conversation, Tangram is in a fascinating location in history; progressive rock's mainstream in the late '70s and early '80s is a dedicated move toward pop-rock, a genre that itself in the late '70s and early '80s is increasingly moving toward the electronic sounds and sparkling production that late-period krautrock helped to usher into the mainstream, which means that with Tangram, there's a whole lot of genetic material colliding. In a way, it's the moment that the parallel evolution of krautrock and British prog became convergent evolution, toward a singular, hybrid '80s sound.
That's a lot of history for one album to hold, especially one as slight as Tangram. Maybe I'm grasping for straws here because there's not a ton to talk about with progressive rock in 1980. Let me know if that's true.
Otherwise, see you next time in 1981!
1] The Germans themselves called it "kosmische musik," which gets at the movement's ambitions a lot better and also doesn't reek of jingoism like "krautrock" does, but since pretty much nobody in the English-speaking world calls it that, I'm kind of bound by convention to stick with the obviously worse "krautrock" label.
2] I've alluded a few times to the anti-prog sentiments of the rock press, but probably the best showcase of it is this sort of genre distinction that peels away parallel movements from the label on the basis of whether or not they contain the most hated elements of progressive rock. Krautrock is music born out of European psychedelia, has rock instrumentation that experiments with extended song lengths and additional unconventional instruments, incorporates jazz and avant-garde textures, and focuses on the album rather than the song—that sounds a lot like prog to me, and if the only difference is the degree of experimentation (krautrock is undeniably weirder), then it doesn't really seem like there's a meaningful difference between the two besides country of origin.
3] In fact, the vocals on Cyclone are sung by Steve Jolliffe, an Englishman. He had also played keyboard and some wind instruments on a very early iteration of Tangerine Dream (before even their first album), but Cyclone was the first time playing in the band since then, as well as his last time playing in the band before going solo again.
No comments:
Post a Comment