Scribed by Sandre the Giant
I’ve spoken already about how 1993 was somewhat of a revolutionary year in death metal, with masterworks by Pestilence, Gorguts and Atheist leading the way for progressive death metal’s invention and perfection. But few records in the genre stand out to the same level as the debut of Floridian legends Cynic. ‘Focus’ was where progressive death metal went jazz, and then went off a cliff. A remarkable achievement to be so utterly different but yet so utterly respected, ‘Focus’ is a timeless work. Thirty years ago, the band gave us this masterpiece and I’m here to tell you why it is regarded as such.
‘Focus’ is an album like no other. If you imagined that Atheist were alien lifeforms, and they wrote an album, it still wouldn’t be as disjointed and weird as ‘Focus’. The shifts in time signatures is dizzying, the odd vocoder laced vocals of guitarist Paul Masvidal combining with the growls of keyboardist Tony Teegarden. THEY HAD A KEYBOARDIST!? What is this, real prog?? Masvidal’s riffs weave in amongst those of Jason Gobel, while Sean Malone’s fretless bass wanders everywhere at all times (check out that passage in ‘Textures’ for an amazingly fluid chaos on those bass strings). Sean Reinert’s drumming is unbelivably complex as well, somehow keeping each part of the ever-maddening guitar work contained within the shell of a ‘song’. The songs though, oh man the songs. You’ve got classic prog death like ‘Veil of Maya’, you’ve got the weirdly djent-like ‘Sentiment’ a full 15 odd years before the genre really existed, the spacey riffs capturing wandering bass in ‘I’m But a Wave to…’; ‘Focus’ was a record that truly felt at times like your classic Morrisound, Floridian death metal band (try the thunderous old school death of ‘Uroboric Forms’) and at others felt like nothing else on earth (also ‘Uroboric Forms’, disappearing into cosmic realms unknown at points).
It wasn’t just the music that was all over the place. In a genre littered with gore, violence and blood stained lyrics, Cynic took inspiration from religious mysticism, philosophy, spirituality; its cover was that of a surrealist painting from the 70s. The whole package felt so atypical that the band broke up a year later because of the reaction to it. ‘Focus’ is a record that, in the depths of early 90s death metal was so alien and different that it suffered from the ‘NOT METAL ENOUGH’ crowds that couldn’t understand the nuance and genius. It was only many, many years later that the band finally got its appreciation it deserved, and that ‘Focus’ truly was regarded as a lost classic. Dropping it into the middle of a scene that was on the verge of disappearing and being so utterly different, the band never really had a chance. We are just lucky that over time, it gained the status it always deserved.
In the year of our Lord Satan 2023, the influence of ‘Focus’ comes sharply into, em, focus. Damn, that was bad. Some of metal’s most forward thinking and progressive bands over the last 30 years owe their existence to Cynic. You can sense the jazzy experimentation surging through the likes of Meshuggah, Dillinger Escape Plan, Decrepit Birth, Mastodon, while Veil of Maya and Textures were both named for songs on the record. An increasingly timeless record, only the more straightforward death metal sections date it to early 90s Florida. The rest of it could be from any time in musical history. We finally got the follow up we all wanted on 2008’s ‘Traced in Air’, and the band have stuck around ever since. That’s the kind of return and respect we’d all been wanting.
https://www.facebook.com/Cynicofficialpage
The Killchain 