Did Cynic really have to make a third album? In 2006, the Florida progressive metal paragons returned to the stage after a decade away from both recording and performing (plus a short stint under another name). The first phase of Cynic’s existence had been short but crucial; in only five years, they evolved from an atavistic thrash band to a frame-breaking alloy of technical death metal and thundering jazz fusion, crystallized on their wonderfully vexing 1993 debut, Focus. Two decades later, Focus still sounds like future music, an impossibly complex rush of disparate parts and unseen twists that maintains its momentum in spite of its bewildering mechanics. It’s righteous and affirming, too, and not just for its instrumental heroics; with his voice floating in a web of electronics and his head in a cloud of self-made mysticism, Paul Masvidal extolled the infinity of the mind and the sovereignty of the individual.
Their post-reunion LP, 2008’s Traced in Air, thrived on a similarly ambitious mix of power and prowess, though the aging members Cynic had tempered the ambitious parts. The metal, jazz, and math seemed partly pulled apart, strands that no longer held one another so closely. It was a worthy successor and proof that their legacy could live beyond one 15-year-old benchmark. It was also a chance for graceful closure. Instead, Cynic have made Kindly Bent to Free Us, a debacle that scraps not only that exit opportunity but also a chunk of what made them interesting at all.
As if to prevent the perception that they, after a quarter century, simply became just another band aiming to issue a new record every several years, Cynic drastically shift their approach for Kindly Bent to Free Us. In fact, on album three, they leave approximately half of their sound behind. Though Kindly Bent to Free Us does get dense and loud, with the occasional viscous march and tempestuous drum burst, they slough off much of their metal persona for eight tepid tracks. These pieces bend toward post-rock (mawkish closer “Endlessly Bountiful”) and prog (the swiveling “Moon Heart Sun Head”). Brighter production and fewer moving parts dovetail to give Masvidal’s computerized vocals a broader spotlight, too. At their best, that choice offers a pop-like gleam. At worst, it shapes the songs into the unintentional comedy album of the year. Lyrics lifted from the cereal Rice Krispies float above ceremoniously solemn guitars. The plea “Oh mercy, radiate your grace on me” lingers as the grand, laughable conclusion of a particularly knotty span. And that’s just before Masvidal, singing with a choir composed only of himself, informs us repeatedly that “There will be holy fallout.” His tone is clear, clean, and garish. Without the frisson afforded by their more aggressive portion, Cynic’s music becomes a string of unfortified punchlines.
The mere deletion of Cynic’s metal side isn’t itself a satisfactory condition for the failure of Kindly Bent to Free Us; some of these hooks are among the most radiant moments in the band’s catalogue, and some of the instrumental interplay ranks among their most fascinating. It’s not pedestrian, either. These guitar solos remain knots of notes that seem to start and stop time. Cynic also relishes in the daunting task of dividing melodies across every instrument, as they do at the start of the interesting “Gitanjali.”
But the omitted ingredients make Cynic too predictable—not only for the rote order in which things happen here but also for the things that never have the chance to happen. Focus might be impossibly complex, but at least on a structural level, these new songs seem flatly simple, as though the trio plugged parts into an algorithm and played to the resulting script. They favor short, vaguely threatening intros followed by full-band bursts, as that’s how three of the first four songs begin. By the time opener “True Hallucination Speak” reaches its second chorus, its routine movement between quiet and loud, full tempo and no tempo has already become a bore. “Moon Heart Sun Head” seesaws between marching, drum-led verses and lulling, bass-heavy impasses. Even a hyperkinetic solo and a lengthy sample of philosopher Alan Watts reading from his The Nature of Consciousness can’t excite that back and forth. If you get the feeling that you know what’s coming next while listening to Kindly Bent to Free Us, your premonition is most likely correct. In losing a chunk of their identity, Cynic also lost their ability to do the entirely unexpected. They once launched the listener into a sense of wonder and kept them there for minutes on end. Not here.
In the past several years, the bands of peoples’ dreams have reunited. Some have cashed in with high-profile gigs but (at least to date) recorded little else, while others have dazzled with new material that made you mourn their initial hiatus once again. Still others have embarrassed themselves with endless cash grabs and new recordings that amounted to debacles, and a few have made new material that sounds more or less like what they left behind. Cynic is a most peculiar case, though: They got back together to play the old stuff and ended up enjoying the experience so much that they wrote a copacetic follow-up to the only album they’d ever made. And now, after the reunion buzz has had time to dissipate, they’ve embarrassed themselves with a record that fails because it divides their legacy in half. Kindly Bent to Free Us works as a sort of retroactive insult: It resurrects many of the misgivings people have always had about Cynic—the overindulgent vocals, for instance, or the ponderous new-age musings—and runs wild with them. In fact, when I listened back to Focus after hearing Kindly Bent to Free Us, those traits felt like strangely fresh faults, where they’d once been part of Cynic’s unlikely sui generis appeal. It’s a shame that the present now haunts this band’s peerless past.
