Conor Fynes 'Reflections Of A Dying World' - Cynic (3/10)

After a relatively successful '88 Demo', Cynic had introduced itself to the local Florida metal scene with a demo that sported fairly decent sound quality, songwriting and band performance. With this having been said, it comes as something of a sour surprise that the year after, Cynic would return with a second demo that takes the band's strengths from the first and downplays them to something fairly less enjoyable. After a switch up in their line-up, Paul Masvidal takes the reins for vocal work, and there is the addition of a second guitarist into Cynic's sound. With 'Reflections Of A Dying World', the music stays fairly static and unchanged from '88 Demo', but the steep decline in recording quality makes this one something of a failure.

The riffs remain sharply rooted in thrash metal, close to bands like Slayer, or even the fellow Floridan death metal act Death. At this time, Death was a few steps ahead of Cynic and it is clear from the guitar riffs and songwriting that Paul Masvidal was an adherent to the teachings of Evil Chuck. The musicianship is fairly standard for thrash metal, featuring a focus on speed over complexity, and guitar solos aplenty, which on a related note are also the greatest thing that this demo has going for it. Paul Masvidal's growls here are better than Jack Kelly's from the first demo, but not by much. Unfortunately, every sound on 'Reflections Of A Dying World' is brought down heavily by the recording quality, which sounds as if Cynic threw away whatever means they had to do proper recording with '88 Demo' and opted for something much noisier and unpolished. The end result is a demo that may be a step forward in terms of the band's development, but a great step back in terms of enjoyable music.