TesseracT - Sonder

Helping the djent movement continue to propel through the beginning of the decade with a greater focus on space-y prog than most of their peers, TesseracT made their first mark with the prototypic, but still musically proficient and emotionally gripping epic, “Concealing Fate” (released as an EP in 2010), which later showed up as part of their debut full-length, One, in 2011.

During singer Daniel Tompkins’ time away from the band immediately afterward, TesseracT recruited the vibrant, talented, and classily showy Ashe O’Hara as a short-lived replacement to release one of the decade’s freshest and most melodically enticing progressive metal albums, Altered State, in 2013. A little lighter on the djent and completely devoid of growls, Altered State and Ashe O’Hara showed how TesseracT could shine by playing to their more atmospheric and melodic strengths while using djenty heaviness in a more dynamic way than they had before. After looking forward to the future of TesseracT with him at the helm, hearing of O’Hara’s departure so soon after his joining was a big disappointment for me.

It can’t be easy returning to a band who just released their best work (and one of the decade’s most notable prog albums) without you, but since his return Daniel Tompkins has adapted nicely to the band’s exclusively cleanly sung approach and he’s done the songs on Altered State justice on the stage (which I happened to have the pleasure of seeing front row during their tour with Gojira). He’s a talented and fitting frontman for TessereacT and I don’t want my unabashed love for O’Hara’s work with the band to ruin my possibility to enjoy what the band are doing once again with Tompkins. While of course following up Altered State was always going to be a gargantuan feat, the band handled the challenge well and showed themselves to be moving forward nicely with Daniel Tompkins at the helm on the at-least-adequate Polaris.

Though it’s their shortest long-play to date at 36 minutes, Sonder marks the first time for the band to have released two consecutive LPs with the same singer; even though this one’s short, it still counts. Taken from the artificial Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, the album’s title, “Sonder”, is defined as the enlightening realization of one’s own insignificance in the lives of others who live lives as emotionally complex as one’s own and who one them as one of many negligible secondary characters of life just as one sees them as such: an obscure melancholic meditation indeed. Bright, atmospheric, melancholic, and enlightening have long been fitting descriptions of TesseracT’s work, especially their more recent, exclusively cleanly sung output. On Sonder, though, Tompkins unexpectedly reintroduces the mix of harsher vocal techniques to TesseracT’s dynamic, just a little bit, but giving many sections a far less meditative, somber mood than what the album’s title suggests to be abundant.

That being said, TesseracT’s reunion with screams and growls has come at the right time. Tompkins has been continually and tenaciously improving his vocal chops over the years (tremendous respect to him for his continued improvement and hard work, by the way), and although he is a talented vocalist, his use of only cleans in TesseracT’s music on Polaris felt like he was trying to synthesize what Ashe O’Hara brought to the band. Again, Tompkins is a fantastic singer, and he performs O’Hara’s parts well on stage, but it didn’t feel like he was being entirely himself on their last album. With this record, he breaks through that, and perhaps it’s a realization of his own characteristic merits as a vocalist that shaped the reflection of this album. After trying to live up to his replacement, Tompkins seems clearly more content being the singer he is on Sonder.

“Luminary” starts the album off on kind of rocky footing, awkwardly jumping to and from basic djenty sections and more atmospheric prog rock sections. The clean vocal melody of the chorus (which comes in just before the instrumentals kick in, in distinctly cheesy alt. metal fashion) isn’t one of the band’s most exciting either. Following it, the second-longest track on the album, “King”, ups the prog and metallic heaviness, introducing some screamed lines and a gradual build that culminates in a somewhat fulfilling bridge section, but even ten minutes into the album, it still feels like the band is just warming up.

Although it’s the shortest track on the album, serving as kind of an ethereal segue, “Orbital” brings in a feeling of euphoria that the previous two songs were missing, and it continues magnificently into “Juno”, whose gorgeous, uplifting, and energetically cathartic instrumentation conjures the type of positive emotional whirlwind that I love hearing from this band. Both end up being the best two songs on the album, and together one of TesseracT’s most beautiful suites.

The two-song suite “Beneath the Skin / Mirror Image” falls in line compositionally with most of what was on Altered State in how it so smoothly blends these gorgeous, spacey swooning sections with more metallic, syncopated rhythms from all the instruments. I love the string-bending riff that plays in the first, optimistic section of the song. The second half of the track takes a more confessional tone, and the super bright but melancholic atmosphere the instrumentals cultivate remind me so much of Anathema’s recent work (Weather Systems and Distant Satellites). Again, this could easily have been added on, at least from a musical standpoint, as one of the suites on Altered State, and not that he should be worried about it, but with his clean vocal performance on this track, Daniel Tompkins has proved himself capable of achieving with TesseracT what Ashe O’Hara was.

The album’s lead single, “Smile” integrates a hazy synthetic beat that persists between the bass line and the more straightforwardly djenty guitar rhythms. But it’s Tompkins’ frightening wordless use of his high range and his familiar growls that really elevate the track. Its transition into the closing track is executed smoothly and serves as a nice coda to the song, but the last song on the album, “The Arrow”, doesn’t really feel like it concludes the album all that well in its short burst of soaring djentiness followed by echo-y ambiance.

Though the middle of the album is packed with quality prog metal with TesseracT’s name written all over it, by the end its unusually short run-time still makes it feel like it’s not totally complete, like it’s something more of an EP than a full-length experience. It has some of TesseracT’s best moments on here, and it’s not all that inconsistent past the first two songs. I can appreciate Sonder as an honest expression of TesseracT where they are now, and I’m glad they didn’t pack it with filler just to stretch it out to a typical prog album’s length. But simultaneously, I feel like the band should still be capable of more than what they showed here, and I can’t shake the feeling of this new album’s shortness being a product of a fear of not being able to include more on-par material. Nevertheless, I’ll appreciate Sonder for what good it has brought to the table, and I hope it continues to propel TesseracT further as they build their artistic chemistry. I know they’ve probably meditated through it and probably even discussed it as a band, but if I could tell them anything, I would just remind them that they don’t need to make Altered State again, and they don’t need to feel sucked toward doing what worked on that album if it’s not working so consistently now. They’re a talented group on both the performance and compositional fronts, and they shouldn’t be afraid to facilitate their creative urges in unfamiliar directions.