Daniel Tompkins - Castles

I did not know until a week or so ago that lead singer of TesseracT, Daniel Tompkins, was releasing a solo album. I’ve always respected his work with TesseracT, and even though I believe the band made their best album (Altered State with Ashe O’hara) with a superior singer during Tompkin’s absence, I think he has returned to his role in TesseracT as gracefully as possible and has done Altered State songs justice in his live performances. I think he’s adapted well to the band’s newly vocal-centric sound and held his own on the two TesseracT studio albums following his respectable return to the band.

Consequently, I think Tompkins has earned himself these 35 minutes to branch out and showcase his abilities outside the context of TesseracT or Skyharbor (not that it’s something he has to earn).

The album consists of only 7 tracks that constitute a pretty brief and leisurely affair steeped in ethereal synthetic pop and prog rock/metal. Tompkins’ voice is consistently soothing and soaring and the spacious instrumentals across the track list do serve to enhance his angelic vocal presence, but aside from that, most of the compositions don’t really reach their fullest possible form or go anywhere all too great to begin with. The opening track, “Saved”, a slow, ethereal opener that builds very gradually into a kind of electropop rocker that hearkens back to Living Things-era Linkin Park is a good example of unfulfilled instrumental potential. As smooth as it is and as smooth as Tompkins’ vocals are over it, its growth from intro to outro seems stunted and it feels like it never really launches into what it seems to be building toward. The following song, “Black the Sun”, on the other hand, I wish stayed in its softer sections for its entirety because Tompkin’s vocals during its explosive parts are rather mishandled from a production standpoint. And the song “Limitless”, is a shockingly tactlessly bass-bolstered vocal prog anthem; the dubstep-ish synthetic bass is so obnoxious over the rest of the otherwise ambient song’s mellower elements it’s impossibly distracting. 

The far more well-handled wooshes of electronic bass on the song “Kiss” thankfully give the album a much-needed boost of anticipation and energy. As far as other highlights go, the piano-led softness that opens the song “Cinders” into its more cathartic and instrumentally dense body makes for one of the compositional highlights on the album with its well-arranged dynamic shifts. I also really like the strings and spacy vocal echo samples on the gentle closing track “Telegraph”; it makes for a tasteful, careful, and subtle finish to an album that needed a justification for its foray into this style of music.

Since I’ve discussed all the other tracks I may as well mention the 808-laden title track also; it provides another more subdued and vocal-focused ambiance with some effects laid on top of Tompkins’ voice that almost sound like autotune. It’s a nice bit of vocal new prog ambiance, but it’s also not the most gripping of compositions to grace the album.

For what it is, a bit of a seemingly tentative and side-quest-ish solo venture, Castles does for Daniel Tompkins what he set out to do, which is provide a new context for his vocal abilities. But even so, Daniel Tompkins has showcased more range and technical ability in TesseracT, live and in the studio, than he has here. I mean, he sounds great over these tracks, but it still feels like a missed opportunity for him to just diva out and freestyle with his voice a bit, which these songs do seem to be constructed to foster and which would have definitely spiced the album up greatly and appreciably. And I know he could have done a great job of it too, I’ve seen him do it live with TesseracT; perhaps the new musical setting was just a little too unusual for him to let completely loose in.

C’mon, have some confidence man/10