Wednesday: Cynic - True Hallucination Speak

     After a delay of a few days, Cynic's Kindly Bent to Free Us came out this week, provoking metalheads everywhere to once again question whether or not Cynic can still be called a metal band.

     Fans who lamented the less-heavy direction taken with Carbon-Based Anatomy won't find a whole lot of redeeming qualities in Kindly Bent to Free Us, and fans who dug Cynic's experimentation with space-jazz-prog likely won't care that death growls and robot vocals have been all but jettisoned in favour of a more organic approach. But I think both camps can agree: that is some fat bass tone.

     A lot of metal bands, the bass sits way down in the mix, its lame recreation of the guitar parts barely audible underneath everything else. Not the Cynic of Kindly Bent to Free Us. All of the instruments in Cynic have always been on much more equal footing, and the time around Sean Malone's bass in right up in yo' face.

     Album opener "True Hallucination Speak" is a perfect example. Malone's deft fretboard manoeuvrings are centre stage alongside the guitar, at times carrying a lot more of the load while Masvidal is being a little more hands off. Is it still metal? I don't know, but Kindly Bent to Free Us is growing on me like the wacky tree-shaped trippiness on the cover.

Cynic - The Lion's Roar

     Prog nerds among you will have seen by now that the next Cynic album is due out in February, and that it's called Kindly Bent to Free Us, but today we got another tasty tidbit to salivate over for the next couple of months in the form of a new song.

     "The Lion's Roar" is the first song to be released from the new record, and if it's any indication of what we can expect from the rest of the album, then what we can expect is proggy post-metal with *gasp* poppy threads running through it. It's different from Carbon-Based Anatomy, but at the same time not radically so. Have a listen and see what YOU think.

Exist - Self-Inflicted Disguise

     Do you like fusion-metal band Cynic? Are you eagerly counting down the days until they release Kindly Bent to Free Us in February? Is the wait until Valentine's Day just too goddamn long for you? If your answer to any of these questions is yes, then today's band might just be the methadone to keep you going until you can mainline some more sweet, sweet Cynic.

     Said band, Exist, even have a Cynic-al connection: frontman Max Phelps is a member of Cynic's current live line-up, as well as being the frontman for the current line-up of Death to All, the Chuck Schuldiner-tribute group organized by Death-alums and Cynic prog-nerds Paul Masvidal and Sean Reinert.

     What all of this six degrees of separation stuff means for you is that Exist displays a lot of the same jazzy-sounding prog-metal goodness that can be found in Cynic's more recent work, making Exist a pretty tasty way to make it through the next couple of months. Have a listen to "Self-Inflicted Disguise" from Exist's debut LP Sunlight and see if it'll scratch that fusion itch for you.

Cynic - The Space for This

     Prog dorks the world over shared a communal musical boner today with the announcement that Cynic's long-anticipated next LP, entitled Kindly Bent to Free Us, will be released on Valentine's Day 2014. Even though I'm a latecomer to the Cynic fold, I'll still freely admit that I'm one of those dorks.

     Such feelings of arousal, however, are alas not universal. The proggier, spacier musical direction of Cynic's last EP, 2011's Carbaon-Based Anatomy, left many old school Cynic fans unimpressed, and this EP continues to be divisive, with some fans lamenting the band's progression away from it's death metal roots and some fans embracing it.

     I'm one of the latter, and I can't wait to hear a whole album's worth of newer-school Cynic, but as an olive branch to the former chunk of Cynic fans I've decided to go back a bit in the band's catalogue for a song to commemorate the occasion of the album announcement. To that end, your song this evening is "The Space for This" from 2008's classic Traced in Air, because I think that's a track and record we can all get behind. Cynic fans of the world unite!