Roughly two decades after the band stopped, Manuel Cardoso rebuilt Tantra around himself and made a new studio album — long, orchestral in scale, and sung in both Portuguese and English. It is the only Tantra record where Cardoso is the sole link to the earlier group.

The short version

A studio album self-released in Portugal, recorded over about two years at Estúdio Noites Longas and mastered with advice from José Fortes. Eleven tracks running to around seventy minutes, with bilingual titles pairing English and Portuguese. A note on the year: this page follows the date used across the site, while the compact disc and the contemporary reviews date it to the year after. It is new studio material, not a live album or a compilation.

Two decades on, a new band around one survivor

Manuel Cardoso is the only member from the classic band; everyone else is new. Bruno Silva plays second guitar, Pedro Condinho bass, the drummer credited as Bébé the kit, Luis Ramos keyboards and Guilherme da Luz synthesizer, with guest keyboards from Pedro Sales, guest solo vocals from Patrícia Almeida and a student choir from the Lisbon technical university. It is less a reunion than a reconstruction: Cardoso carrying the name forward with a new generation of players rather than reassembling the old group, and the choir and guest singer widen the sound well past what the original quartet could have made.

The sound

Reunion-era, orchestral-scaled symphonic prog. The album returns to the long-form symphonic writing of the first two records after the new-wave detour of the third, and it is bigger than any of them — more players, a choir, and pieces that run past ten and twelve minutes. Some of it revisits the band’s own past directly: one piece reworks the debut’s ‘Máquina Da Felicidade’ and another is titled ‘Zephyrus II’ after a piece on the second album. The vocals are split between English and Portuguese.

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The songs

The bilingual titling is the thing to know: pieces carry paired English and Portuguese names, so ‘Edge Of Oblivion’ is also ‘À Beira Do Fim’, reaching back to the debut’s opening track. ‘Kali’ runs to around eight and a half minutes, the title piece ‘Terra’ to around nine and a half, and ‘Edge Of Oblivion’ past twelve. ‘Return’, subtitled after ‘Máquina Da Felicidade’, and ‘Zephyrus II’ are the two pieces that most directly rework the band’s earlier material, tying the comeback back to the two 1970s albums it reaches over.

Reception and legacy

No chart placing or certification is documented, and its ProgArchives page could not be read at the time of writing, so no aggregate rating is quoted here. Unusually for a Tantra record it did draw a named review: Douwe Fledderus, writing for the Dutch site progVisions in April 2003, covered it, and dates the recording to a two-year process. On the year, the fact box follows the CSV while the disc itself carries the following year, which is worth stating rather than smoothing over.

The verdict

This is a genuine comeback record rather than a nostalgia exercise, and it is more ambitious than either of the 1970s albums, though whether it is better is another matter. What it has is scale and sincerity; what it lacks is the original band, and a Tantra that is Cardoso plus a new ensemble is a different proposition from the quartet that made the debut. Come to it after the first two albums, as the sound of one man carrying a name across twenty years, and take the reworkings of the old pieces as the bridge they are meant to be.

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