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Released on September 18, 2015 via Kscope
I approached this record with some trepidation, I must admit. TesseracT are a band that hold a special place in my heart as they acted as a gateway band into the wonderful world of tech and djent (I appreciate that this is a dirty word these days). Their sound, their unbridled groove, technical mastery and emotional impact all resonated with me way back in 2009 after the release of their debut album One. This was followed by an EP, the excellent Altered States full-length and 2014’s live Odyssey. This journey has included a bit of a revolving door for vocalists, but Polaris sees the welcome return of Daniel Tompkins, widely considered to be TesseracT’s seminal vocalist, to the microphone. Given the momentum that the band have gathered over the last few years and the return of Tompkins, the weight of expectation heaped upon Polaris is very high. Can TesseracT deliver?
The answer to this is ‘yes, well, kind of’.
First things first, the album is pretty much everything that a pure fan-boy wants – it sounds perfect, the production game has been stepped up and everything sounds so, well, smooth. The drums sound huge, the bass is perfectly pitched in the mix, cutting through beautifully and highlighting the interesting bass lines, the guitars have a wonderful tone, both clean and dirty, and the keyboards and electronica are, again, perfectly pitched in the mix and really add texture to the songs. The crowning achievement of this record is in the vocal performance though – Tompkins proves he is more than worthy of the expectation and delivers a career best performance. The vocals soar over the instrumentation, providing an emotional anchor and resonance over song structures that could sound cold and technical without his softening influence. Bringing the two together is a masterstroke, allowing for the more mechanical grooves of the genre to balance with the warmth and smoothness of the often very imaginative vocal lines creates an overall sound that is all-enveloping and makes for a beautiful listen at times.
The album itself is wonderfully constructed, songs flowing perfectly and making perfect sense. Opening with the aggressively groovy ‘Dystopia’, and moving into the slower paced ‘Hexes’ works beautifully. ‘Phoenix’ demonstrates some real restraint and dynamism throughout its run time to create a brooding atmosphere, but that restraint is most notable during the beautifully emotive pay-off, where the song is crowned by a remarkably simple progression that fits perfectly, demonstrating the band can resist the temptation to over-complicate the songs. The occasional lull in the pace, such as the beautiful ambient introduction to ‘Cages’ serves to break up the album nicely; this is good because the rolling groove that TesseracT fall back to on a regular basis can feel a bit overwhelming over the course of a full album. In fact the writing this time has taken this more on board, with closer ‘Seven Names’ playing with more of a standard rhythm, stepping back and allowing the epic vocal line to lead to wonderful effect – like a mint to cleanse the palate at the end of a tasty meal.
So what is the bad news? Well, it’s not moved on much. This is a small criticism to make, I suppose, when you baseline Polaris against the excellent One and Altered States, at least, but I think it is a valid one. My expectation of a band that positions itself as technical and progressive are for an evolution, to be surprised when I listen, even if it’s only by small things. Polaris feels like the iPhone of albums – a small incremental refinement of a truly great formula. By no means a bad thing; it’s still a great album, just not the step forward that is hoped for on release day. Just like an iPhone, it’s predictable. When the bass groove drops into ‘Utopia’, it’s obvious that should go there. Not that particular groove – which is an awesome riff by the way – but that ‘a’ bass groove will fit there. That’s just an example, but the core feeling when listening to the album is a curious mixture of elation and disappointment. Elation that it sounds so great, and disappointment that there’s not more. To be fair, I remember feeling something similar when I heard Altered States, and that didn’t stop me from loving that album.
In conclusion, this is a great album of songs that manage to be both sprawling and tightly written, to feel huge and lush, yet slightly claustrophobic, and it should be a pretty straightforward ‘must-have’ purchase for fans of emotionally engaging, technical music. It’s a highly polished and deeply refined formula which sounds beautiful and is topped with a superlative vocal performance, both in terms of writing and delivery. As a body of work Polaris manages to retain its soul and emotional authenticity despite the polish, which is both important and rare, and this is at least partly due to Tompkins’ performance. For these reasons alone, the record comes highly recommended, and you should check it out. Existing TesseracT fans will likely love it; personally for some reason I expected something more, and as a result my enjoyment feels a little on the hollow side, like Polaris is a slightly missed opportunity, as unfair as that may be. In this way TesseracT are a bit of a victim of their own very high bar, and turning in a merely great album may never been enough.
