- Progressive metal fans may be many and varied, but the genre remains patently uncool from the perspective of practically any other genre nut. Too digital and technical for the hipsters, too slick and melodic for underground metal heads and punks, it’s music for either outsiders or people who just don’t wish to have their musical tastes pigeonholed. Of the modern practitioners of this sound, few are treated with such reverence as English five-piece Tesseract.
Three years after their last long-player Polaris, the band returns with a leaner sound on new album Sonder. It’s still a Wagnerian blast of mathy time signatures and knuckle-busting riffs ‘n bass lines but the group have also condensed their ambition into some of the most precise and focussed music of their career.
Amid the frenzied technicality, vocalist Daniel Tompkins provides the human touch, moving from soaring bellows to falsetto pop croon with effortless panache.
That directness I was talking about is immediately apparent in opening track Luminary, which takes the band’s musical trickiness and places it within the framework of a three-minute verse/chorus single. Next song King is somewhat more widescreen, adding a dab of vocal growls and an epic, multi-movement structure. That said, it’s only the eleven-minute Beneath My Skin/Mirror Image which recalls the expansive song suites of their earlier work. The remaining songs are comparatively brief blends of prog, metal and ambient textures, given both power and melodic softness by frontman Tompkins.
The closest comparison you could make with Tesseract would be Australian progressive bands such as Karnivool and Dead Letter Circus, as they share those band’s blend of virtuoso arrangements with emotive hard rock melodies. But while those bands’ albums showcase ambitious metal kissed by the Australian sun, evoking road trips to Byron, Tesseract are understandably more glacial. Those icy London winters are reconstructed in sparse, haunting synth lines and terrifyingly precise drums with snare sounds that resemble planets colliding. That said, if you have ever sweated through a Cog gig, you’ll be ‘air-guitaring along’ to this in no time.
- Matt Thrower.