Bear with me, I am an outsider to the world that surrounds TesseracT and Ashe O’Hara. The talented pipesman rejoined Voices From The Fuselage after his well respected stint with the geometrically sound outfit. This “cinematic” progressive rock band have just released their latest album, simply titled Odyssey: The Destroyer Of Worlds. Now, other than a few spins of Altered State and some of his YouTube videos, Ashe O’Hara is not one of my regular plays. Imagine my surprise when, completely against the grain, I really enjoyed this.
Glassy, delayed clean guitars and layers of studio produced vocals? Check. Tremolo picked buzzsaw riffs and belched vocals? No. Obviously not. For someone so in deep with the more extreme end of metal, Odyssey… really pricked my ears up after just one listen. Admittedly, I went into this fully expecting to put together a snidey shitpost about this album. Turns out you can teach an old dog new tricks (or turn a hater into a rater, for the layman). O’Hara’s vocals work with the bare landscape of music behind him in certain parts. The sense of theater that Voices From The Fuselage can whip up using traditional metal instruments is laudable. I don’t quite know what movie this would be the perfect soundtrack for, but that’s what it brings to mind, something that TesseracT could never do for me. Saying this, after two or three songs, I’d be shutting this off were it not for the vocals on display. They help twist everything together into a sweet, cathartic knot. One the listener gets to unravel them self.
-MM