- Jamming is one of the most intuitive forms of music, just taking that urge to let your noises flow out and connect with others; libidinal and natural and when it comes together, so satisfying. It’s a musical comfort food.
Sydney’s Tangents are making their comfort food to go - the success of their second album, Stateless, was made much bigger by signing with US indies Temporary Residence and they’ve spent the last year tripping about the world sharing their avant-jazzy-jams with a lot of ears, on the road with arty labelmates MONO and Tortoise. Sounds fun, but they say you should never do what you love as a job: it’ll just take everything that you loved about it and slowly strangle the life out of it. I can imagine how it would be for the life to go out of jamming, for every improv to start sounding the same, a journey of discovery that no longer involves any discovery at all. Or I suppose it could be the reverse: finding the intricacies in the jam, improv’s scope for endless detail. That could give you life beyond the maddening repetition that consumes so many touring musicians. Or there's even a third path: you could just surrender to the music itself - a fiery ritual that just keeps you coming back, like Baptists going back to church for the old time good stuff each Sunday.
That’s an explanation that fits for Tangents’ third full-length, New Bodies. I found it confusing at first, the most complex and glitchy idm elements that characterised their previous record are ever-so-gently receding now and the band are leaning, comfortably, back into the sounds that you’ll remember from their debut, I. That means looping rhythmic structures, tooled with stunning speed and precision into great, ambient soundscapes.
Early comparisons to The Necks again seem appropriate, where avant-jazz is created by hypnotic ritual rather than a controlling intellect. The progress of these rituals, from gentle loops to thundering cyclones of sound -with every member of the band making as much of a cacophony as possible- are very obvious on the eight-minute but still, somehow, concise statements of the singles so far, Lake George and Terracotta. I’m not sure the band like being called postrock, but the trajectory of these musical journeys feels strongly influenced by the style, perhaps a result of hanging around MONO so much?
The band do make time for other things here, including the piano-tinged prog of Arteries, a friendly, meandering improv taken from this year’s accompanying EP, Stents & Arteries. Immersion does a lovely impression of a torrential rainfall, really making the most of Evan Dorian’s incredibly intricate drumming, consistently one of the most impressive things on New Bodies. Gone To Ground takes the pattern of earlier tracks and blows it out to ten minutes, leaving quite a lot of space for the song to mosey along, moody but a little aimless before that pressure finally, inexorably builds ... even if it never quite climaxes; whoever the perp is that’s Gone To Ground, I guess they got away? In this way the epic tract is less of a centerpiece and more of a plateau. The smilingly upbeat lilt of Swells Under Tito is a bit of a lonely figure against the dark background of most of New Bodies, its gentle swing almost lapses into what sounds like calypso, of all things; the pleasant gesture doesn’t feel like one the band is really geared to deliver. Closing number, the suitably nebulous Oort Cloud is also a mood apart, but the scintillating piano ambience, phasing in and out of focus a little like a classic Reich construction rubs shoulders a little more easily with the other jams here. There’s an oddly random quality to the songs of New Bodies, one that could have been at least partly addressed by something as simple as thinking more carefully about tracking. Instead Tangents hit like a freight-train with the album's most powerful cuts and … let the rest sort itself out, like they’re not even sure you’ll still be listening.
You should be listening. Whether Tangents are moving back or forward in their musical journey and however they sling it together, their sound is still essential. Even as more bands -Floating Points, Bitchin’ Bajas, BADBADNOTGOOD- make their mark in a very similar musical space, the jazzy complexity and hypnotic intensity of Tangents is a jam that is their own and nothing can stop it really coming together.
- Chris Cobcroft.