Genre : Easy Listening Anti-Sludge
Label : Season of Mist
Origin : United States
Rating : 9.5 / 10
Buy it now
The Portal Tapes contains music that you can decipher in real time with a grateful set of ears. This is not something that is a "given", as it is natural these days that a disc demands a learning curve. Not THIS baby. It is clear as a crystal, only clearer. The now-full-musculature variant of Cynic's notorious demo session is audio data that has zero concept of strain or lies. Everything I hear on the record is straight from the heart to the heart astral data that manages to convey both dignity and beauty, and not for a single moment I feel like I am being cornered into a -oops - corner to get deprived of my reactionary emotions that the music seeks to toll on me. Cynic "simply" plays the music that they find both honest and beautiful, and, these qualities are reflected in your soul with zero obstacle in the way of the pleasant transfer the album as entity embodies. Read on to find out more about this fine contribution.
The shape of things on this release sounds to me as a special blend of exigent anti-sludge and the best days of Foo Fighters being put on marijuana. The Portal Tapes is a spiritual relative to Wobourn House, only less lethally morose. This Cynic album is capable to present a reverberating listening experience without being fueled of coarse ambitions or showoff-arrogance to do so. It is "just" music - that is exactly the most a music critic expects while optimistic - which has nothing obtrusive in its way at all. Michael Jackson says in an interview that artists tend to get in the way of the music. "Don't get into the way of the music!" - he adds - logically -, and oh, he is so right, in my opinion.
The Portal Tapes LP is a contribution that contains data taken from-, and composed of a natural sonic flow of astral beauty that has a very clear and dainty anatomy to it. Once again : very clear, elegantly simple, but utterly dainty musical anatomy. Track number 7, "Mirror Child", for example, brings to mind Faith No More's Evidence, and I'm pretty sure Mike Patton would sing this song wholeheartedly without a second thought occurring to him in the process.
A set of favorite pastimes of the release are to be mentioned as the premiere defining ingredients of it. Cynic has a superb taste for thrilling harmonic passages, and, so efficient these passages are indeed, that they do not get tedious during the repetitions they are recruited for, quite the contrary : they are used for just the right amount of turns, giving their respective places to another superb follow-up pattern (per motif, of course) that wants to add to its surroundings as opposed to interrupt them with stimuli that is hard to grasp at first. The choruses, the verses all reeking top of the heat easy listening music that is coming from the heart with a natural flow and beauty you can't get around, no matter how hard you try. Okay, the chorus of track number 10 has a little bit too much of Grimes retardation going on, but it is good. (For the exact same reason.) At ultimate value, this here is an instant seducer album and an immediate recommendation.
Rating : 9.5 / 10
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