Cynic
Traced In Air

Preface.

In this, hopefully brief, prologue, I would like to provide some clarifications regarding the review I am about to produce.

First of all, the reason for choosing the album in question: while being aware that a review already exists for it, I have nonetheless decided to replicate it due to a strong feeling of disagreement with what was expressed by the fellow Debaserian author of the previous analysis.

First of all, allow me to ask the kind reader who is not a newcomer to the sound world of the Cynic not to make fruitless comparisons with the predecessor "Focus", as it would be an insult to our (reviewer/reader/potential buyer of the CD) intelligence to think of finding a single and solid connecting thread between the two works, moreover 3 decades apart without a hypothetical evolutionary path.

I believe that sometimes one may come across bands capable of being so innovative and healthy carriers of mutations that each of their album/events can be considered nothing more than the result of an extraordinary concentration of inspiration: like the collapse of an exploded star, the release of "Focus" drained Paul Masvidal and Sean Reinert to such an extent that, to find the attitude and spiritual strength necessary to follow up on an album well received by the press but not equally successful in sales (because this must be remembered, at the time Roadrunner did not have much satisfaction and economic return from the publication of our debut work), they had to forcibly and slowly evolve, also adding such personal growth to give them a vision far removed from those turbulent early '90s.

The product of this new metempsychosis is the long-awaited "Traced in Air": a wonderful dreamlike journey without musical barriers, without forced belonging labels to this or that movement, free from potential historical ties with a burdensome past. Pure freedom, freedom to explore, to express, to not fear the reactions of an audience that in the past has already failed to welcome and understand.

And simultaneously this wonderful inner strength (if you want to call it stubbornness) in exclusively proposing sound waves that are difficult to assimilate for those, and they are the majority, who cannot soar beyond the cardinal points of a musical consciousness accustomed to the habitual.

It is useless to speak of genres or subgenres, of manifest or unconscious influences: everything one might expect from a Cynic album is present in this new opus, the dreamy atmospheres and vaguely new age (especially in the lyrics once again focused on a totally personal vision of the human being), the broad-spectrum sound mixtures, the supernatural individual technique, the positivity that breathes throughout the album, all contribute to making "Traced in Air" yet another timeless multidimensional pearl in the career of ours.

The only perplexity is the excessive homogeneity (or continuously inoculated excellence in every single track) that makes the album in question devoid of those natural sinusoidal curves of approval that tend to imprint a strong memory of the individual tracks: this doesn’t mean emotional flatness, quite the opposite, see for example the (almost) instrumental opener "Nunc Fluens" (tribal and poignant at the same time) compared to the more intimate "Evolutionary Sleeper", but it would be entirely futile to get lost in the single description or in the dissection of a work to be enjoyed all at once like a wonderful journey through a universe where spatial coordinates deform under the thrusts of a suggestive force without equal.

Happy listening and joyful rebirth.