Since this band’s birth ten years ago, TesseracT created a very specific, own-faced vision on the progressive side of Metal Music. Personally I am not that much ‘into’ this kind of sonics, but when it comes to this band specifically, I cannot but express a modest form of appreciation.
With Altered State I won’t change my opinion either. For the bigger part, this album goes on in the vein of the former material (remember the exciting Perspective EP?). Based on that EP, by the way, the band won a trophy as best band on London’s 2012-edition of the Progressive Music Awards.
Lyrically the album deals with different stages of mind, i.e. matter, mind, reality and energy (stories written by newly recruited vocalist Ashe O’Hara, who replaces former singer Eliot Coleman). The music on the sophomore full length follows the path of the debut One, but it surely strengthens their own sound too. Every single song (lasting in between two and nine minutes) contains a certain variation, i.e. it consists of changes in tempo, atmosphere, emotion, melody and performance. But more than before as well, the ten songs interact well as a whole (remember the conceptual approach I referred to at the beginning of this paragraph). The ten pieces balance in between aggression and integrity, in between positive and negative emotions, and all this comes with a full, decent sound quality and an experimental approach that rejects exaggeration, but welcomes open-mindedness. It’s like Tool being covered by Between The Buried And Me, Evanescence collaborating with Periphery, or Meshuggah and Animals As Leaders mixing Groove and Metalcore into their songs…