a week or so ago i was bidding on ebay for a record i wanted badly. it was animals as leaders' first self titled full length. but not only this, i was bidding on the glow-in-the-dark vinyl pressing out of 106 copies. i don't have any glow in the dark colour records and the combination with this great album made it very desirable. in the last twenty hours of the auction a bidding war flared up. i mean, i was expecting it to go for considerable money but when i saw the end result, i was stunned.
that fucking thing went for over one hundred euros. boy, i bid something over sixty bucks and thought that was pretty inflated. sometimes i am amazed at what people pay for those plastic discs. ok, anyway, why am i telling you this when the post title indicates something about cynic? well, the same seller who offered the glow-in-the-dark animals as leaders record also had a copy of cynic's latest album "kindly bent to free us" up for grabs.
and it wasn't some random copy, it was a semi-translucent bronze colour copy of the first press. one of the most limited colour press. so i also prepared myself to pay a good chunk of money for it and then something unexpected happened. i don't know what it was. probably people lost their interest in bidding over that erruption concerning the animals as leaders record, or "kindly bent to free us" isn't that sought after as i thought. whatever it was, i got it for fourteen bucks. good catch in my book.
musically this the great quirky, progressive metal that cynic perfected. there is a certain depth and beauty to their music which i fail to describe with words. on "kindly bent to free us" the band reduced the death metal parts, which is really the only reason why i like "traced in air" a bit more. the drum sound is very organic and a nice contrast to the extra-stringed guitar and bass. the band's third full length under the name cynic is complex but never loses focus. prog supremacy. 150 copies made. season of mist records. 2014.
