TRACED IN AIR

I respect the fact that Cynic reunited to record this album, but as far as the album itself goes, I simply don't find anything that blows my mind. The armony between some sort of experimental vocals and a progressive approach to technical death metal sound that the band had accomplished in "Focus" is now broken with "Traced in Air", that presents a much more "lighter" (vanal) version of this band's progressive - technical death metal.

Don't take me for a narrow minded metal head, I enjoy progressive rock as much as I enjoy a number of metal subgenres. "Traced in air" represents neither of them, I think. Since the beggining, with "Nunc Fluens", one can hear a diminished version of "Focus", with "The space for this" i strongly start to dislike the album, this song takes only a minimum of Cynic's distinctive proggresive sound and combines it with a "niu metal - metalcore" kind of relation between vocals-strings. From "Evolutionary Sleeper" to the end of the album, there's nothing more to say, all of this tracks mantain a formula i've started to hear a lot in these years: "Technical" guitar sound, a growl now and then, not really achieved melodic vocals, and really simple progressions.

I really feel sad with this album, I expected a lot more from Cynic, "Focus" is a great album though. I surely hope new progressive-technical metal bands start to listen some Death or Atheist, in this particular case ("Traced in Air"), I'm sure they didn't.