Cyrax - Pictures

Cyrax

Pictures

by YngwieViking at 21 February 2015, 3:14 PM

The Italian bunch from Milan CYRAX, is the exclusive prototype of an intricate studio project, born under an inventive and artistic impulse of freedom, a hybrid style created by blending technically demanding/high pitch vocals Metal, with some kind of unpredictable progressive colors and many synthetic-cyber-experimental sounds in an unexpected form!

Following the positive wake after their critically acclaimed debut album “Reflections” (Musea 2013), CYRAX have signed a new deal with Bakerteam Records for the publishing of their second effort called “Pictures” the release date is set for late March.

It features eight tracks including an ambitious and odd triptych suite “Shine Through Darkness”: fifteen minutes of pure demented mayhem and sheer craziness, plus a bonus instrumental with Funky/Jazzy flavors to conclude the disc.

The mesmerizing four minutes track “Oedipus Rex” is as bizarre as its name suggests, a gloomy and quirky song, clean dissonant guitar intro, reinforced by layers of screams upon a soprano chant, a dark lullaby with Hammond organ/baroque violin section and a destructured staccato pace enhanced with hyper abrasive Thrash Lead vocals and operatic choir…DESTRUCTION meets THERION meets KING DIAMOND… Impressive!

The album was carefully recorded at RecLab Studios with behind the mixing desk  producer/Keyboardist Larsen Premoli (from the excellent DESTRAGE fame)…If the sonic design is pretty well elaborated, in perfect coherence with the core of their music and on focus with the intellectual side of “Pictures”, the very rigorous ambiance, the bold spirit and the hermetic sensation is somehow difficult to swallow at first, the lack of human interaction could be a restriction for most casual listeners, scary for the newbies with music of this caliber .

For once, the guest list is not a marketing operation, it contains various musicians, each one of them adding a very distinctive flavour to the already vast array of musical influences that belongs to the sound of the band, including Operatic Progressive Rock, Medieval Heavy Metal and Neo-Classical Music…The hypnotic method, the mechanical schema in the riffs, the brutal contrasts or the stressful pattern are quite constant and not easy to digest!

Such an ultra dense songwriting must be completed with a clever thematic, mixing poetry and a dystopian (realistic?) vision, exposed in its most darkest shades of black, summarized in the song “The 7th Seal” with lines such as “Feeling the pain of our own obsession/Watching this life falling in slow oblivion/Feeling faith becoming empty words/Watching this knight falling by the sword” orchestrated in a weirdly structured musical environment with Gregorian choir, acoustic strings quartet or Djent breakdowns both fusion in the Symphonic and Industrial models, clearly far from your everyday Prog Metal!

Verdict : I’m in a strange mood, in an post-traumatic aftershock with a mixed feeling of altered perception, my mind should theoretically be seduced by their challenging goal and epic direction, but I am still in a lost state of mind, yet in confusion regarding the classification I have to give!

Perhaps this uncertain attitude, is the best semantic trick for a reviewer in order to complimented this incredible & insane second album?