video review: 'kindly bent to free us' by cynic

Well, that was definitely an experience for sure. Next up on the docket... hmm, well, I should probably get that Cole Swindell album out of the way. After that... well, we'll see. Stay tuned!

album review: 'kindly bent to free us' by cynic

First, a question: how many albums do you listen to in a year?

This year, with the reviewing, I'm probably set to break two hundred. The average person I reckon doesn't get much above five percent of that, and even that feels charitable. What it ends up meaning is that I expose myself to a ton of music on a very regular basis from many different genres, and on a technical level, you learn to recognize unique facets of certain bands. You learn to hear guitar texture or triggering in the kick drums or nuance in vocal delivery or true instrumental complexity done in a cohesive manner. But the average listener doesn't care about these things - hell, even most music fans don't care about those elements, which puts me - along with other critics - in a complicated situation when it comes popular acts who attempt more experimental albums and screw it up. The two immediate examples that come to my mind are Mind Over Matter by Young The Giant and The Outsiders by Eric Church, two albums that tried more 'technical experimentation' in their instrumentation and didn't do it well by any stretch of the mind. It wasn't cohesive, it didn't flow well with the rest of the track, and it sounded sloppy - but yet the average listener is never going to pick up on that. Hell, they might find it mind-blowing if they don't know otherwise - and as a critic, it's a delicate balance between recognizing your own perspective and criticizing an act for poor execution.

Now that's not a recanting of my opinions - I stand by my comments regarding those acts, harsh though they may be, and while I can identify possible knowledge gaps in my audience, willful ignorance and blind myopia infuriates me to no end. So let me aim to correct some of that and introduce you all to a band you probably don't know if you don't listen to progressive metal, and one of my go-to acts when pointing out how to make complex, technical music incredibly well: the genre-defying band known as Cynic. Starting in the late 80s, they exploded with their debut album Focus, which is widely considered one of the best progressive albums ever released - even though defining the genre Cynic fit in was always a challenge. Death metal growling juxtaposing with spacey vocoder singing, progressive time signatures fused with jazz-inspired harmonies and rhythms, it was an album that was not looking to make it easy on the listener and demanded a lot of listens to truly decode. It was an awe-inspiring debut album that remains a classic...

And then Cynic split up and didn't release any new material for fifteen years. They thankfully reunited in 2006, and two years later released Traced In Air, an album that took steps away from the band's rougher roots towards a smoother, spacier sound. And the album is goddamn amazing, one of the best of 2008 and a long-time favourite of mine - I honestly like it more that Focus! But that album, along with the remix album Re-Traced and the EP Carbon-Based Anatomy were signs that Cynic wasn't content with being a traditional metal band or one that could be easily defined. And with early buzz suggesting their newest album had dropped the growling entirely and had moved even further towards progressive space rock, I had no idea what to expect from the oddly titled Kindly Bent To Free Us. So how did it turn out?