Cybion is an anticipation concept album. It is one epic piece, but is divided in 20 parts to have some reference points for the listener. 13 years after their demo here is their first complete album. There was not a record company that dared to put some money in the band to release it. They all think there is no market for it. The only fortunate thing about it is that the French had no pressure from any company. Therefore they could work for more than 10 years on this album.
Like a movie you have to listen to the complete album to get the right feeling and impression. The bottom-line is that this is a kind of melodic death metal with grunting vocals, but this is combined with clean singing parts, melodic serene parts, many tempo changes and the progressiveness of a band like Dream Theater. Besides these influences there are too many other bands that can be mentioned as influences.
After a movie kind of intro the band starts rather heavy. After a few minutes the complexity of their style takes form. With female vocals, weird sounds from out of space and soundtrack-like musical parts woven in between the heavy parts and it still doesn't turn into a mess. The band has the ability to keep it interesting and even after 10 times listening you still hear new interesting things. Next toDream Theater, bands like; Cynic, Ayreon, Ramstein and a lot of death metal combo's are influences, I even hear some big band and black influences.
To give the concept more form, the band even created their own language called Kal. In the bands view they can create more poetry in their lyrics using their own language. Maybe that is truth, but I can only say that it is no problem listening to it. The CD is available only as a deluxe digipack. In that pack they also put an extra bonus CD called 'Origins'. Together with a few other songs they recorded some covers from bands they admire. On this one you find cover songs of DreamTheater - 'A Fortune in Lies'; Cynic - 'How Could I'; Emperor - 'I Am the Black Wizards' and Loudblast's - 'The Dazzling Abyss'. All performed very well, an ode to their heroes.
If you are still not convinced, maybe the last thing to get you that far to order this album is the names of some guest musicians. Angela Gossow (vocals), Arjen Lucassen (vocals), Paul Masvidal (guitar solo), Tom Maclean (guitar solo), Andy Sneap, David Scott McBee (vocals), Christophe Godin (guitar solo) and a lot of others are on the list.
For all the other details you can visit the bands website. Readers, do yourself and the band a big favour, BUY this one, you get yourself one of the best records of 2009 and personally I have already found one that is going to be in MY END OF THE YEAR LIST!!
