Tesseract – with Circles -The Gov – Tuesday 11 September 2018.
Words Geoff Jenke
The Gov was a sea of black T Shirts on this night for Tesseract. The predominantly male audience members were wearing their bands with pride. Many were in Tesseract T shirts, old and new, some in Sepultura, Pantera or Metallica T’s with a smattering of Circles T’s.
Melbourne progressive powerhouse band, Circles, were the perfect fit as special guests to Tesseract. They have a new album, The Last One, to promote and are off to conquer the world later this year. As soon as they hit the stage the men in black in front of the stage started headbanging to the music, Ben Rechter’s vocals soaring above the maelstrom sound happening behind him. Labelled Prog Rock, they covered many of the labels given to metal bands, Power, Extreme, Speed and even just plain Hard Rock in their short set. The music can be intricate and epic but also at times simply beautiful. I hadn’t heard of Circles before but after this powerhouse performance, I will be following them closely. Oh, they had a great T Shirt design as well at the merch stall.
Tesseract – a four-dimensional analogue of a cube (source – Wikipedia.)
Tesseract – a British progressive metal band from England. (source – Wikipedia)
On this evening at The Gov, I think at times the music was so intricate that the two meanings above blended into one. It’s been three years since the band’s last visit and 2015 album release in the successful Polaris. Since then they have been touring the world headlining tours and playing support to bands like Megadeth. They are back with another new album in Sonder to promote.
They hit the stage with Luminary, off the afore mentioned new album. The band were full of energy and the lighting as atmospheric as the music being played. From the latest album, the band journeyed back to the debut for the epics, Concealing Fate, Part 2: Deception and Part:3 The Impossible and had the mass in front of the stage writhing with heads moving rapidly up and down.
Daniel Tompkins amazing soaring vocals are often joined in contrast by bass player Amos Williams growling dirge, to great effect. Daniel acknowledged the fans up front all night, often pointing to individuals or grabbing hands reaching out to him. Four songs straight from the Polaris album followed in Survival, Dystopia, Hexes and Phoenix.
To cement how great a progressive band they are, (not that we needed any proof) Tesseract rolled out Of Matter: Proxy and Of Matter: Respect from the Altered State album.
The set seemed to come to an end with band members taking off guitars, but the band never left the stage. There was just a slight wait until the final two songs were played, the band finishing off with the wizardry of Concealing Fate, Part1: Acceptance.
With the band gone, those down the front started a chant of “just one more song”, which carried on for nearly 10 minutes. Alas, the band did not return.
Catching Tesseract certainly was an enlightening experience.
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