Album Review: Tantric - The Sum Of All Things

The theory that pop culture rides on roughly twenty year cycles is proving to be true, as nu-metal has been rearing its head for the first time in many a year, right on schedule. That includes the reappearance of several of the quickly forgotten bands that had one big hit before fading from memory. Trapt is around for the wrong reasons, but they are still getting attention. Puddle Of Mudd can somehow draw enough people to tour, Saliva was going to get back together until they realized they hate each other too much, and good ol' Tantric is back for their first album in a long time.

Their one hit, "Breakdown", was never one of my favorites of the time. If I'm being honest, when I saw the announcement of this album, for a second I thought it was Taproot, whose one big single I did actually like. My disappointment was not much, however, since hearing either of those bands at this stage isn't something I'm all that keen on.

Having mentioned that song, let's start with it, because a re-recorded version is available as a bonus track. The sound of the early 00s is completely dated, but even a recording so out of time is better than what we have here. This song makes it glaringly obvious, but the entire record is so poorly recorded and mixed that I don't quite know what to make of it. The sound is amateurish at best, and it pains me whenever I hear an album that sounds worse than what I have heard come out of a laptop in someone's bedroom. Production is a skill, but it's so available to so many people now that I don't think I can excuse records that sound this terrible. I'm sorry, but you can make a better record with software available for free.

It isn't just the guitars I'm referring to that sound bad. Hugo Ferreira's voice is rough in ways that sound painful. I suppose it could be an intentional vocal fry effect being put on almost every note, but it sounds more like a voice that is decaying before our eyes. It's hard to have much presence of charisma when it sounds like you're not able to get that hairball coughed up. Seriously, listen to the first line of "Can't Find This", where Hugo is singing over a lone piano, and tell me there aren't hints of Cookie Monster in his warble.

And it's a shame that they can't provide a polished product, because their songwriting is solid. A lot of the bands from that time get a bad wrap for their quality, and a lot of that is well deserved, but this album makes a solid case for Tantric deserving a second shot at the mainstream of rock. It is still a product of the time Tantric was born from, but that actually sounds fresh given how little the genre has evolved since then.

So what it comes down to is this; Tantric have given those of us who still remember their heyday a nice reminder of the better aspects of that time, but have presented it in a way that sounds like the demos for a proper album. That does diminish the appeal, because the record's production does make it less enjoyable to listen to. I wasn't in the studio, so I don't know what Hugo is capable of, but these performances need more work to be at the standard of a professional sounding band.

They say you can't judge a book by its cover, but in this case you can. Listen to Tantric cover their own big hit and ask yourself if it sounds good enough. That was easy for me to answer, and it's why the conclusion I come to is this; "The Sum Of All Things" would be a good record if Mark Lanegan was singing it, rather than this poor imitation of his style. As it is, I'm not going to be excited to revisit the sound of this record, even for the good songs, which are definitely there.