It’s been a rough road for Cynic frontman Paul Masvidal over the last year or so. With the sad and untimely deaths of bass player Sean Malone and former drummer Sean Reinert, it would have been reasonable to assume that any new music produced under the Cynic name would cast a bleak shadow indeed.
Terrible news in the world of music as bassist Sean Malone, best known to metal fans for his time in Cynic, and other contributions to progressive music and Jazz, has died. He was just 50 years old. No cause of death has been revealed at this time. The news was shared by Cynic leader Paul Masvidal on Facebook in a message: “I learned today that Sean Malone has died. I am numb and grief-stricken. He had a brilliant mind, a gracious heart, and was one of the greatest musicians I’ve ever encountered. I know that this is a shocking loss for so many fans whose lives he touched with his artistry, as it is for me,” Paul added. “Please keep him in your thoughts and listen to his playing to celebrate his life.” In addition to playing on the critical Cynic albums Focus and their comeback Traced in Air, Sean was in several Cynic side projects, his own prog band Gordian Knot and wrote a series of incredible books on bass guitar for publisher Hal Leonard. Several artists also took to social media to share memories of Sean and grieve the loss. Malone’s death follows the passing of bandmate Sean Reinert, who died in 2020 at 48 years old. We send our sympathies out to his family, friends, and fans. Continue reading
One of the more underrated tours this summer so far that definitely should be getting a bigger buzz is the Cynic headline tour. On the strength of their excellent new album Kindly Bent To Free Us (Season of Mist) the band is embarking on coast to coast jaunt and taking with them some exciting bands to boot. Ghost Cult will be catching this tour in a few weeks near our HQ in Boston. Lucky for us Bostonians we have an abundance of great progressive music in this town with Berkelee School of Music and several prestigious local conservatoires. The second leg kicks off soon, so we will truly have a Prog Metal party in this town on the night of August 9th.
Kindly Bent To Free Us was our Album of The Month for March this year. As Cynic main man Paul Masvidal told Ghost Cult in a wide ranging interview for the cover of Issue #16, Cynic was never intended to be a band that re-made their seminal Focus album over and over:
“I mean it’s funny, because it’s the same attitude I have right now, the mindset I have right now, this is the same person that created Focus. They want us to to recreate a sound would have never happened had I not been this person. It contradicts the very nature of the band to try and play it safe, do something familiar, repeat a pattern, stay in a cocoon, of “we found a sound, let’s just recycle it”. That goes against everything this band represented. Especially at the beginning with Focus, we were going against the grain. Everyone was offended and everyone was confused, we had a really hard time back then. It took a while for people to come around and realize there was something there. And now they want to keep you in the same place. It’s the eternal dilemma that every artist goes through, that has a work that maybe it’s received well. It represents a time and place, and has a sort of historical reference, and people want to keep you there. They are forgetting, we change too. We evolve. Art is not a static thing. It is alive. The very nature of Cynic is to honor that process of being open and having skill as a musician, enough to develop a voice that keeps expanding and exploring. For me anything but that, would be the death of this project. It is all about a platform for freedom and exploration. Art is not a thing, it’s changing. That is how I view it. I can’t imagine it any other way.”
Cynic is not to be missed live and still pulls out many an old gem live from the Focus era. In addition to drummer Sean Reinert, Cynic is joined by bassist extraordinaire Sean Malone who rarely has toured with the band, in spite of playing on every recording the band has made. Joining Cynic that night will be three other bands. The atmospheric, piano driven jazzy alt-rock of The Reign of Kindo will surely mellow out the crowd ready to rock out. Meanwhile Lesser Key will thrill fans of bands as diverse as Failure and Pelican. Lesser Key has among its ranks former Tool bassist/co-founder Paul D’Amour. And last and not least, local Boston prog metal heroes Protean Collective are opening the bill. They are still supporting their recent epic album The Red and the Grey and are calling your name if you like Scale The Summit and other modern prog bands.
Cynic on Facebook
The Reign of Kindo on Facebook
Protean Collective on Facebook