DANIEL TOMPKINS: Ruins (ALTERNATIVE ROCK,Alternative Metal): review / opinion to read on Music Waves

When a musician strays too far from the musical style that made him successful, he loses fans, it's almost automatic. Ask Steven Wilson what he thinks about it. Maybe it's a fear that Daniel Tompkins wanted to dispel by re-recording his first solo album, "Castles", released last year. For despite the great qualities of this album, the electro pop turn taken by the singer was very far from the style of predilection of his main band, Tesseract. The idea of revisiting it in a rock and metal version will therefore undoubtedly reassure his audience and above all allow him to defend it on stages dedicated to progressive metal without breaking the atmosphere. Anyway, if "Castles" was a successful modern pop essay, "Ruins" is just as successful, if not more, in a register halfway between modern metal and post metal.

More than a revisiting of "Castles", "Ruins" is a complete re-reading of it, so it can effortlessly be considered as a new album in its own right. From his previous essay, Daniel Tompkins kept only the lyrics and most of the vocal lines. Everything else - instrumentations, structures, tempos and even the song titles - has been modified. The result is brilliant in every respect. Darker, more powerful, strangely more melancholic, all the songs take on a particular flavor, sublimated by Daniel Tompkins' exceptional voice and his incomparable talent for combining power and softness.

'Empty Vows' is emblematic of the transformation of an electro pop track, called 'Saved' on 'Castles', into an explosive and captivating alternative rock track. The same goes for the indus rock track 'Kiss' which becomes here the brilliant 'Tyrant' with its post metal ambiences, or the melancholic 'Cinders' renamed here 'Stains Of Betrayal', with its marked progressive metal colors. Even if Daniel Tompkins doesn't completely abandon the electro ambiences of 'Castles', he only uses them on 'Ruins' to reinforce the modernity of his music ('Sweet The Tongue'). But he frees himself from them most of the time to allow the guitars, almost absent on "Castles" and omnipresent on "Ruins", to underline the melancholy of the vocal lines, as on the sublime 'Ruins' (originally 'Castles'), the atmospheric 'A Dark Kind Of Angel' which has little to do with the original 'Telegraph' and its synthwave loops or the excellent 'Wounded Wings' that Plini comes to sublimate with a solo of which he has the secret.

Finally, the only weak point of "Ruins" is the unreleased track 'The Gift' which, despite the presence of Matt Heafy from Trivium, has difficulty to reach the level of the rest of the album. Still, "Ruins" is almost flawless. By revisiting his own music, Daniel Tompkins gives it more than a second wind, he literally transcends it with this intelligent and addictive album. - Official website

DANIEL TOMPKINS

RUINS

KSCOPE

ALTERNATIVE ROCK