Year Of Metal #013: Cynic - Traced In Air

The 2008 sophomore effort from Cynic gets off to a promising start with the mostly instrumental “Nunc Fluens”. Beneath a wash of screaming feedback and relentless quasi-tribal drums, we hear heavy jazz elements, a little like Jack Johnson-era Miles Davis, especially in the bass. It’s captivating and unusual, and the record sort of peaks here. That’s not to say I didn’t appreciate a lot of what follows, but the sci-fi influenced prog-metal once again doesn’t entirely work for me. 

On the likes of “Evolutionary Sleeper”, especially, we’ve got the same problem Dream Theater had at times: it sounds suspiciously like Muse. Sein Reinert’s percussion is once again right on point - he leads the flow of these songs, filling the whole frame or dropping out as required - but the vocoder vox are a bit anaemic, and the track stretches for grandiosity it doesn’t quite grasp. I also see in the credits that the main singer doesn’t handle the death growls, which feels a bit like a keeper having his centre backs take his goal kicks for him. 

I enjoy Traced In Air more when the songs are less sweeping and more technical. “The Unknown Guest” is really cool, complex, precise riffs moving in step and the vocoder put to much better use. Here singer Paul Masvidal blends with the players while Tymon Kruidenier growls, roars, and even chants in the lower reaches of the track. It builds to a brilliantly weird solo and a piled up, well earned dramatic finale, getting through a lot of work in four minutes and change. 

The insistence on those dramatic touches is to an extent what makes Traced In Air a less than thrilling listen from front to back. It feels a little less progressive when every song essentially progresses in the same fashion - a heavy riff, a chunky verse or two, a bit where it all goes serene in the middle, then a rousing finish. The majority of these tracks sound perfectly good on their own and some of them are even better than that. “The Space For This” has real edge in its detached vocals and particularly chunky passages, not to mention another terrific solo. 

Taken as a whole, though, Traced In Air retreads the same ground a surprising amount given it’s a progressive album that doesn’t make it to the 38 minute mark. The instrumentation’s often terrific and I like a lot of what they do with the vocals in theory, but it doesn’t quite hang together.