tesseract one

Released: 21 March 2011 Label: Century Media

As leading lights of the recently much-hyped D-Jent scene, the buzz around rising UK tech-metallers Tesseract has been building for a while, so the expectation is running high, perhaps unfairly so for a band only making their debut full length.

Impressively though, Tesseract don’t just match the high-flying expectation, they pretty much blow it to kingdom come with a fearless album that will make you question everything you thought you knew about modern metal and is sure to be there or thereabouts as one of the best releases of the year.

Like many of the genre descriptions we use every day, the term D-Jent actually means very little and becomes utterly worthless when attempting to describe Terreract. Other convenient descriptions – progressive rock, technical metal – are equally useless, because while One displays elements of all these, the music on offer here has such limitless vision that to pigeon-hole it as such is as insulting as it is redundant.

Musicians looking for a lesson in technique will love the dark and jarring guitar work of Acle Kahney and James Monteith, while the superlative drumming of Jay Postones and the spellbinding bass of Amos Williams provides some of the most intense rhythmic interplay you are likely to hear this or any other year. There are no passengers in Tesseract, and everyone is equally adept at pumping out pummelling Meshuggah-style math-metal or the most evocative and touching of gentle melodies as on the swooning April.

The icing on the cake is the varied and versatile vocals of Daniel Tompkins, a man possessed of an impressive metal scream when needed, but also a soulful and sensitive clean singing voice which adds endless light and shade to the already stunning musical landscape inhabited by Tesseract.

But the biggest factor in the roaring success of One is not the undoubted technical prowess of its creators, but the fact that, like many of the truly great progressive bands, this is music played from the heart. For every bit of jaw-dropping technique, there is just as much – if not more – human emotion in each expertly crafted note and each perfectly measured beat. Nothing here is unnecessary or wasted and it all adds up to something really quite special.

A truly magnificent piece of work.

by Marcus Jervis