ALBUM REVIEW: TesseracT - Altered State

Off of the back of the recent live performance at Sheffield Corporation (and also payday), I picked this album up. I've owned One for a few months and found it quite a challenging record to understand and get into. Taking the plunge into Altered State seemed like a risk, but with the convincing show that the lads put on, a risk worth taking.

So how have they changed since the first album? Firstly, the harsh vocals are gone. Not lessened, not scaled back, gone entirely. And there's not a moment on the album that feels like it calls for them, either. New lad Ashe has a wide melodic register, though he tends to gravitate towards the higher end of the spectrum.

The album is very, very chilled out. There aren't many headbanging moments (if any) from the first listen, and the riffs seem written more to send your head on an astral trip than flying around in the physical plane anyway. The disc takes place across four movements and ten tracks, following a three/two formula. The movements are 'Of Matter', 'Of Mind', 'Of Reality' and 'Of Energy', and move less as individial songs than as larger compositions in the vein of songs like 'A Change of Seasons' or the 'Concealing Fate' suite from One. The blending of songs actually gives a nice feeling of continuity except in a few places during 'Of Mind'.

There's even a saxophone in there on a couple of tracks. I had read about this but it was still unexpected and hit me like a surprise roshambo. Nice.

As an added bonus, the version I bought comes with an instrumental disc containing all tracks sans vocals so you can do some karaoke. This was a total ballache to get onto media player but that's another story.

Overall this is a really nicely written album, chilled and with an overlying feel of introspection to it. Not music for when you're pissed off, but music to calm down with and relax to.

8/10