98. Cynic - Focus (1993)
TBH this is an album I didn't really dig for the longest time, and there's so much going on that it's hard for my Philistine head to wrap my head around even though I've listened to it about ten times in the last two days. Regardless, it just sounds so ****ing cool.
It's a clear influence on bands like Opeth and Between the Buried and Me with its constantly shifting styles: old school technical death metal, prog metal/rock, jazz-fusion, all with some strange vocoder vocals to enhance that feeling that this album was beamed straight from space... often all in a single song, creating a schizophrenic record that boggles the mind with its eclectic eccentricity. I should hate this, and it's certainly hard to pick favs due to song structures that make little if any sense, but again, it just sounds so ****ing cool.
Many of their contemporary "progressive death metal" bands like Atheist and Pestilence tended to play relatively straight death metal before dropping oddball influences somewhere around the halfway mark, creating the illusion of experimentation while not having the balls to truly challenge their fans without any thought to the consequences. Those bands released some good ****, but nothing as singular and just plain bizarre as
Focus.
Just take opener "Veil of Maya": those vocoder vocals mix with clean spoken word, before slowly building to melodic tech death/thrash with old school DM vocals in full effect; then bring in the prog metal before switching within seconds to ultra-melodic, dreamy prog or jazz-fusion or whatever-the-****; cut back to death metal with extreme metal vocals contrasted with more vocoder vocals; then some soloing that even my ignorant ass knows are fire; out of nowehere more dreamy prog, then a few seconds of death metal, then prog metal, more death metal, with each transition within seconds of each other; end song on a melodic note. That's one ****ing song. I honestly don't even know what the **** just happened, but I also don't really care.
The rest of the album is pretty much just as cracked, giving you no chance to really breathe and settle down with any one sound. It's jarring but totally fascinating and strangely intense. Also hella respect for the best DM album cover of all time.