Cynic

Sometimes the wait builds for a long time before a fate that, in some way, had already been foretold comes to pass. When the Florida band Cynic arrive at their debut, “Focus”, it's September 14, 1993, and behind them they already have numerous demos, each more promising than the last, and above all a prominent role in the creation of “Human” (1991) by Death: guitarist and singer Paul Masvidal and drummer Sean Reinert had already helped change the history of death metal, even if not under their own name, raising the technical bar and injecting progressive tendencies into a scene that until just a few years earlier had fed on zombies, corpses and gore.

Fans could therefore already consider themselves ready for “Focus”, presumably an evolution of death metal that would deepen the approach of “Human”, making more personal and creative the sound already hinted at in the demos. They were wrong.

Brought in to produce the long-awaited debut is Scott Burns, already busy with Assück, engaged in an uncompromising grindcore, and with death-metal superstars Cannibal Corpse, as well as many other extremists, such as Cancer, Deicide, Death, Gorguts, Devastation and Obituary. A producer who never shies away from hitting the listener with the sheer power of extreme music, but who has also shown, above all with Atheist, that he can make room for compositional subtlety without sacrificing too much impact. And that's exactly what will happen with “Focus”, an album that will end up wrong-footing many fans.

One of the most debated elements concerns the vocals, or rather the way they're handled across the tracks. The share of growls and bestial aggression is left to keyboardist Tony Teegarden, while the aforementioned Masvidal, reportedly out of fear of causing permanent damage to his vocal cords, opts for a far more eccentric style, singing through a kind of vocoder that gives everything an android, futuristic aura, disembodied and alien. Masvidal's vocoder is probably the most shocking element in the mix, and it's introduced right from the first seconds of “Veil Of Maya”, in the opening lines:

In Maya’s grip illusion transforms verity

Perceiving thus a delusive world of duality

But beyond the shock of a vocoder in a place where you'd least expect it, and once you get over the surprise that the band is in the meantime serving up devastating, technical death metal with progressive touches, it's also the meaning of these opening lines that sounds jarring. The philosophical aura, the spiritual dimension at the heart of this lyric, which then anticipates an entire album built on reflections far removed from the ultra-violence of so many extreme-metal peers, is another important point of departure: poetry, meditation, introspection, mysticism, religion as the central themes of an album that seeks to build rather than destroy, to understand where so many others prefer to hate.

The third shock within the first minute of listening is a long fusion passage that takes over, driven by Sean Malone's acrobatic bass playing. A game of opposites, not coincidentally, which forces the listener into a constant process of reorientation, crossing boundaries of style and content in search of a key to interpretation.

Anything but a mere provocation, “Veil Of Maya” introduces an octet of tracks whose originality is built entirely on contrast and contamination, going well beyond what was heard on the demos and even on the aforementioned “Human”. “Celestial Voyage” is a natural continuation of this path, while “The Eagle Nature”, murkier and more aggressive, seems to want to break free from the icy elegance of the progressive and fusion passages — its opening is so violent — only to then reveal melody amid the death-metal bombardment, in prog-rock flourishes and above all in a dreamlike coda that even recalls Badalamenti's Twin Peaks, as it closes.

This isn't, then, a spice thrown in to whet the curious listener's appetite — this wild fusion — but a means of conveying a new aesthetic of extremism, one in which the jazz-prog side never plays second fiddle to the metal side, but rather the two stand as co-protagonists. Even when the tracklist leans more toward brutal aggression, as on “Uroboric Forms”, with a heart-stopping passage near the end, balance is immediately restored by the instrumental “Textures”, which, freed from vocals, can blur stylistic boundaries even further, making the continuum that runs from the feverish opening fusion to the devastating prog-death-metal finale — closed off in a play of minimalist reflections — sound almost natural. The stellar guitar solo of “How Could I”, followed by a coda in the form of a folk-metal dance, is thus a closing statement fully in keeping with the language chosen by Masvidal and co., and seems to bring to a close the discourse opened by the initial tearing of the veil of Maya. The album's final lines are devoted to another reflection:

Love’s too often only a dream

If I am harsh and unkind to myself

So I share these attitudes with you

For in this spewing cavern of pride

How could I!

The problem with Cynic's “Focus” is that of a band that outgrew its own audience, the one it had been presented to based on a rather hasty pigeonholing: the most obvious choice was to lump them in with the Florida death-metal scene. They ended up sharing bills with the aforementioned Cannibal Corpse, also produced by Scott Burns, and inevitably found little appreciation from crowds who showed up more to be floored by brutal savagery than by Vedic revelations. Partly for this reason, Cynic decided to break up shortly after — yet another case of failure caused by the shortsightedness of contemporary listeners. Time would set things right, granting the Miami band wide recognition among the many listeners and bands who wanted to push past the supposed boundaries of metal extremism.

When they returned to the scene in 2007, they were welcomed as pioneers, and over a second act in their career full of hiatuses and second thoughts, as well as lineup changes and tragic losses, Cynic finally managed to receive the acclaim that, especially with "Focus", they had already fully deserved. Nothing the band has released since has matched the upheaval of their debut, though it kept alive the idea of music without clear boundaries.

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03/07/2022