FOCUS

After making few ordinary 80's thrash-metal demos, Cynic started recording their sadly only album in the legendary Morrisound studios, previously used by such bands as Death and Napalm Death. I must say that i haven't yet heard anything even close to Cynic. Their music is truly unique mixture of hyper-complex jazz fusion and furious death metal, but even when the band plays their heaviest riffs and vocalist Paul Masvidal shrieks furiously, Cynic maintains kind of profound and hmmm... filosofic sound. Unlike most of classic extreme progmetal-records, Focus can also be enjoyed by fans of traditional prog, because the album contains pretty much music that can't actually be even described as metal. The track textures has hardly any overdrive-guitars.

In my opinion, album's highlights are the mysterious opening track Veil of Maya, the haunting, almost nightmarish arpeggio-texture on single track I'm But A Wave To... and the stunning ending How Could I? which i consider to be one of the best progmetal songs ever.

Only bad qualities on Focus, that i can think of, is the strange vocoder-vocal sound, which appears on every track exept the instrumental Textures and it appears to be Cynic's trademark-sound. For some reason, i don't like it too much, but apparently many people do. Anyway, a great record, which i recommend to all fans of complex prog.

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