‘It’s not metal!!!’ – a familiar cry from the more die-hard amongst the extreme metal fraternity when confronted with something that diverges more than an iota from genre templates laid down decades ago. With the levels of experimentation and cross-pollination that have taken place over the last fifteen years or so, it’s a furrow-browed reaction that has held less and less water as extreme metal as a whole has continued to evolve, develop, grow and redefine itself. And so against a backdrop ‘shoegaze’ black metal, ‘ravecore’ and the like, is there still a point when one can reasonably point at a release and say – without sounding like a gurning Neanderthal confronted for the first time with a circular structure otherwise known as a ‘wheel’ – ‘this is not metal’? Yes. And Cynic’s ‘Portal Tapes’ are as clear an example of this as you’re likely to find.
This release speaks volumes – not only about the members of Cynic themselves (and how they have clearly always had more than one foot in ‘non-metal’ circles) but also about how much Cynic’s stock has risen for Season of Mist to have decided to release this collection of remastered demos from 1994 knowing full well that the metal content present here is about as much as the meat content in the average chicken McNugget. It’s a confident move born partly maintaining momentum following last year’s ‘Carbon Based Anatomy’ EP and partly from a notion that, hey, metallers are more accepting of this ‘non-metal’ stuff these days anyway.
So, one can fully appreciate the reason for dusting off these old tapes, sprucing them up and giving them a nice repackaging. Not only that, there’s a good background to the project – following the release of their seminal 1993 debut album ‘Focus’, the members of Cynic teamed up with vocalist Aruna Abrams to work on songs rooted in ethereal, vocal-led progressive music. And that’s exactly what we have here – cosmic female-fronted prog-rock, delivered with the musical competence one would expect from musicians who have established themselves as true artisans of their craft.
It starts well enough – two of the earlier tracks here in ‘Endless Endeavour’ and ‘Cosmos’ should be familiar to anyone who purchased the reissue of ‘Focus’ in 2002 included as they were as bonus tracks and they are excellent. Heavily reminiscent of Cynic’s more astral moments, they are spacey and shimmering, wrapping themselves around the ears like some sort of nebula cloud. Abrams shares many vocal duties with Paul Masvidal (guitars/vocals) and the interplay on ‘Karma’s Plight’ works effectively. As ever, Sean Reinert (drums) and Sean Malone (bass) perform brilliantly, underpinning the chiming chords of the guitars with fluidly inventive rhythm work.
Quite quickly though, things begin to unravel. As Abram’s vocals begin to take centre stage, the material begins to nosedive in quality quite spectacularly. The warning signs were always there I guess but the fine line trodden between ‘beauty’ and ‘saccharine’ becomes painfully apparent. Her vocal sound is too ‘pop’, too light and confected to really carry this sort of material. The song-writing too seems to have been affected to accentuate Abram’s voice, leading to material that simply sounds trite. ‘Mirror Child’ is basically a shallow pop/rock song that one suspects even someone like Katy Perry would turn her nose up at whilst the final track ‘Not the Same’ is nauseatingly light and asinine.
As open-minded as this scribe like to think he is, by the end of the forty or so minutes of this release, I was craving something with a bit of meaty grit to take the sickly sweet taste away. So it isn’t metal – big deal. Of far more concern is that when one gets down to it, it’s pretty much sonic candy floss.
(5/10 Frank Allain)
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