CYNIC — Traced in Air (review)

CYNIC — Traced in Air album cover Album · 2008 · Progressive Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
3/5 ·
Sleepwalker
Cynic is a band with a very distinctive sound, blending progressive death metal with jazzy passages, highly complicated song structures and pretty unusual vocals. Fourteen years after their first studio release, Focus, Cynic decided to return with this album: an astonishingly technical release that leaves me ultimately cold.

Despite this, i can still name a lot of the album that I do like. The band proves to be one of a kind with their distinctive style. Very notable are the vocals, which vary from fierce growls to the futuristic, robotic sounding vocals. Also, the musicianship is nothing less than excellent. Highly technical song structures with riffs and passages that go everywhere. That sounds good, but I’d also like to point out that things feel overly dynamic. The album is a constanty exploding, and therefore lacking a constant flow. This is excactly why I find the album to be somewhat tiresome (and therefore uninteresting) and feel it tends to drag.

Somewhat enjoyable, but in the end tiresome, those are my main thoughts on this album. If you’re looking for some highly technical extreme metal, you might enjoy this. If you want the album to have a nice flow rather than being 34 minutes of non-stop climatic moments, you might like this album much less. Anyway, despite my negative words, I don’t find Traced In Air to be a really bad release, it just fails to enjoy me as much as some other music does.
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