![]() Altered State is important not in spite of its imperfections, but because of them. They stepped away from djent, became actually progressive, and raised the bar for everyone. TesseracT did a very important thing with this album, however. They are best noticed when shuffled with other artists’ works but when listened to from end-to-end, the songs’ individual qualities get lost in a sea of ambient fluff and weak singing. All the songs are individually brilliant. The album is too heavy to chill out to, but not heavy enough for just blasting. These songs all have similar tempos, similar tones, and similar levels of heaviness. The second issue I had was with Altered State’s pacing. Tompkins’s live delivery of Altered State’s songs provides proof: he nails them, and gives new life to this material. However, he has the perfect voice for singing songs about lost loves with an acoustic guitar accompaniment in a coffee shop, but not a metal voice. He might even be a better vocalist than Dan Tompkins, but such questions are matters of taste. The loss of growled vocals did not bother me in the slightest, but Ashe O’Hara’s anemic, emotionless delivery did. It took me almost a year of repeated listening to appreciate this album as a unique artistic expression and not a continuation from One. One had the more rhythmic, percussive quality to it and far less ambiance, while Altered State dialed up the ambiance full-throttle (though not nearly as far as they did on Polaris). Upon my first listen, I noticed Altered State was not a djent album. I’ve had mixed feelings about it ever since. ![]() ![]() I had huge expectations for Altered State when it came out. I stated elsewhere the importance TesseracT has for me. Welcome to the thirty-second episode of A Scene In Retrospect! I hope you’re ready to take in a lot of information today, because we assembled a crew of seven team members (PR/social media managers Inter and Valentin, writer/editor David, staff writers Rodney, Andrew, and John, as well as yours truly) to discuss one of, if not the most important release of the djent movement: Altered State by TesseracT. ![]()
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