If This Is An Odyssey, Why Isn’t The Boat Moving?

What better way to welcome back an old friend and vocalist than to release a live album full of awesome songs, right? This is prog-metal band TesseracT’s theory with live album release, Odyssey. Following the return of past vocalist Daniel Tompkins in mid-2014, the band heralded a third album and a tour. Composed of songs from their Altered State album and Concealing Fate EP, this record is the story of that tour, and the live recording album that spawned from it, called simply, Odyssey.  

Bass in live show recordings always feels nonexistent, and sometimes that even holds true when you are at the event. This is especially the case on this album. That being said, the guitars and excessively loud drums do make for good time. You have beautiful polyrhythmic guitars swaying and grinding through, paired with interesting and lively drumming, weaving from song to song near seamlessly.

For a live album, there is not much audience banter at all, save some cheers from the audience and the vocalist, Daniel Tompkins, thanking the crowd for having him back in the band. Each song was recorded at a different venue which lends each song a different gravity. An example of this is “Singularity” having more space and reverb, giving it an epic, larger venue noise, where as “Nocturne” sounds more personal and close. This aspect really brings the concerts to you.

That being said, the songs tend to all sound similar, especially in reference to the vocals. This makes it easy to have the album fall into the background noise of your daily goings about. TesseracT’s out of rhythm playing, which could jar you back to actively listening to the album, is minimal, being shown only in songs like “Of Matter – Proxy” and “Deception – Concealing Fate Part Two.”

While the album serves more as an expose of TesseracT’s musical and vocal prowess, the great malady Odyssey suffers is that it is extremely easy to not care or notice you even have anything playing on your iPod while shopping.