Edward Ka-Spel

Tanith and the Lion Tree is the 1991 solo album by Edward Ka-Spel, singer and lyricist of The Legendary Pink Dots, remastered here with three pieces recorded in 2012. It was his eighth solo record and the first whose title did not contain the words China Doll. Made at home during the Gulf War, it sets fragile ballads against a dark backdrop of cheap keyboards, radio and loops, and moves freely between song and sound experiment.

Ka-Spel wrote everything and produced and engineered the album with Lady Loop. He is credited with keyboards, guitar, radio, toy guitar, percussion, melodica and voice. Lady Loop adds keyboards to Interference and the two loop pieces. Phil Knight (the Pink Dots keyboardist, credited as The Silver Man) plays on Interference, and Bob Pistoor contributes occasional guitar as Father Pastorjus. The record first came out on Third Mind in 1991, then on SPV in Poland in 1997 and as a double LP on Flesh Eating Ants in 2002. For this edition it was remastered by Martin Bowes at the Cage Studios in Coventry in June 2012.

The title track and Prisoners of War rest on Ka-Spel's voice over repeating minor-key synth lines, close to gothic balladry. Hotel X, almost six minutes long, is a slow, hallucinated travel song, while Phoney War and Old Man Trouble were written as the war unfolded and carry its nervous tension. Between them sit short instrumental interludes such as Interference, Loop 1 and Loop 2. The bonus material opens with a 2012 reading of Don't Look 'Til It's Gone, a song Ka-Spel wrote with Wolfgang of Dark Star for their 1994 album Travelogue. A new version of Prisoners of War follows, and Loop 3 closes the disc with nearly seven minutes of drifting tape loops.

Reviewing this reissue in The Sound Projector, Thomas Shrubsole called the album "a pungent thing, a cathartic spell". Josh Landry, writing for Musique Machine, found the music without the rest of the Pink Dots "quite naked, raw and awkward". He pointed to the title track, Prisoners of War and Hotel X as its strongest moments. Cold Spring noted that the album had been unavailable on CD for fifteen years before this edition.

CD in a digipak, released by Cold Spring on 12 November 2012 (CSR171CD), remastered, with the fourteen original tracks and three bonus tracks recorded in 2012.