By Ben Richardson
Though nurtured in the humid birthplace of modern death metal, Miami, Florida’s Cynic never really fit in with its more brutal peers. Despite having played on Death’s pivotal album Human (Relativity/Sony, 1991), childhood friends Paul Masvidal and Sean Reinert suffused their own material with the swirling melodic experimentation of ’70s prog rock and fusion, creating in Cynic a unique hybrid of extreme metal and avant-garde jazz.
Masvidal’s guitar playing was filled with haunting melody and lithe fretboard runs that drew on scales and modes not traditionally associated with metal, and his vocals, sung through a vocoder, achieved an eerie, otherworldly quality that fit the music impeccably. Reinert’s drumming abandoned the blast-beat bludgeon that defined the extreme metal of the time in favor of a creative, musical approach that fleshed out the band’s experimental sound.
Early demos laid the groundwork for their 1993 album Focus (Roadrunner), which quickly became a cult classic among those interested in metal that was challenging and inventive. Such listeners were few in number, however, and the lack of enthusiasm, coupled with the travails of the music industry and the destruction wreaked by Hurricane Andrew, led to the band’s break-up in 1994.
Masvidal and Reinert continued to collaborate, and in 2006, they announced that Cynic was re-forming. After playing a number of European festival gigs in the summer of 2007, the group entered the studio the record the long-awaited follow-up to Focus. Traced in Air was released in 2008 on the French label Seasons of Mist, and the outfit has recently begun a full U.S. tour as direct support for Swedish tech-metal titans Meshuggah. I reached Masvidal by phone as he waited to take the stage on the tour’s second stop.