I tend to be suspicious of special tour editions of recent albums, even more than I am of repackaged reissues of albums which have been remastered or with bonus tracks. On the one hand, if the sound warranted a clean-up, then remastering is fine, and bonus material is great, but there’s a nagging sense that all too often it’s the fans who’ve already bought the album and who will probably see the band on the tour for which there’s a tour edition who are being cynically milked.
‘Errai’ is a four-track EP which constitutes the second disc in the 2-disc tour edition of TesseracT’s ‘Polaris,’ released last year. It seems rather superfluous to go over ‘Polaris’ here, so this is very much about what’s new. ‘Errai’ features reworkings of tracks from ‘Polaris’, and the premise is that the tracks have been ‘re-imagined by the band’s long time live producer and sound engineer Aidan O’Brien’. Credit where it’s due, it certainly makes a change from bog-standard remixes, live versions, demos or radio sessions – all of which are fine to have, but have a sense of laziness about them.
So here we have quite radical alternative takes on ‘Survival’, ‘Cages’, ‘Tourniquet’, and ‘Seven Names’, and O’Brien’s ambition to get to grips with the complexities and nuances of the songs is clearly apparent.
‘Survival’ builds from a gentle piano to cinematic, bombastic… but not fantastic. For all its brooding crooning and the distorted drums and grand dynamics, it just feels like an attempt produce something that’s suitable for radio airplay: the soul has been substituted by slick production values and the end result is a bit Linkin Park. ‘Tourniquet’ is stripped back and without the chugging bass, it’s dreamy but unengaging as it ripples and drifts over a six-and-a-half minute stretch. More than anything, though, the autotuned-sounding harmonies sit a bit uncomfortably.
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‘Cages’ broods and creates atmosphere and tension, but it’s ‘Seven Names’ which is perhaps the most successful of the set, in that it retains the original’s dynamic and while the big sound burst is pulled down to a more restrained level, it works well as a delicate post-rock song.
As a standalone, without the punch of the originals, ‘Errai’ could perhaps be considered a shade lacking, but as a companion to ‘Polaris’, fans won’t be disappointed.
TesseracT Online
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