Cyrax are an Italian band founded in Milan twelve years ago by Marco Cantoni. Novo Deus (New God) is their fourth album, and the lineup is Cantoni on vocals & choirs, Gianluca Fraschini on guitars and choirs, and Lorenzo Beltrami on drums, percussion & choirs.
The terms progressive rock and experimental music carry with them such a wide-ranging spectrum of definitions and influences as to be almost redundant in linguistic terms, but I do think I can state that for the listener this album is truly experimental, a veritable smorgasbord of language, culture, style, and rather unique, taking sounds from around the world.
So, let’s look and listen.
Hewa Kunikosa starts us off. Straight from the get-go, I can absolutely assure all potential listeners that if, over the years, you have enjoyed the Real World output of Gabriel’s project and studio, you will be absolutely all over this. I have embedded it below to give you a taster of what to expect from this album. Deep and dark choral joy, some crunching riffs, ethnic voices, fascinating percussion, orchestral backdrop, then morphing into a sort of funk show supported by heavy riffs, then swirling keyboards, deeply introspective words, and sounds, really unlike anything I have heard in I don’t know how many years. Astounding noises. I love it, and here is a rarity for me, without really having any sense of what it is all about.
How do you follow that? Well, with Nesnesitelná Lehkost Bytí (The Unbearable Lightness of Being), which was adapted into a superb film starring the incomparable Daniel Day-Lewis. This begins with a lovely violin before moving into a riff supported Eastern European traditional folk number. The voices are stunning, and the heavy riffs are pulsating.
Bhagavad-Gita is a primary scripture for Hindus. If it is possible to have a piece of music which has at its core a crunching metal sensibility, with eastern promise, and chanting verse, then this is what you get here. The brief English lyrical passage below is a core theme of the work:
“Can I see another's woe, and not be in sorrow too?
Can I see another's grief, and not seek for kind relief?”
Yuéliáng translates from the Chinese as “moon”. I have embedded this below. There are some lovely traditional voices and instruments on this. The sense I get from this is almost a surreptitious service and I especially like the expansive choir and rock as the track comes to its conclusion.
Tatsuta-Gawa is the Japanese River Tatsuta. It is a famous spot for viewing autumn leaves, and there is a sense of the autumnal in this track, with some starkly beautiful female voices interspersed with crunching metal riffs and noises, with traditional instruments coming to the fore. Listen to it below. Please do feel free to contact me if you have ever heard anything like it before. I know I haven’t. It is superb, and I really enjoy the sharp morph to a traditional European rock segment about two minutes out prior to the reassertion of the core theme.
The title track follows (it is Portuguese), and it is a jazz infused delight, dreamy, respectful, and perfect for a cold night outside smooching inside. Beltrami’s flute is wonderful, and I like the distorted guitar riff and there is a deliciously smoky tenor sax solo in there.
No Dormireis translates as You Will Not Sleep. It is a traditional folk song, I believe, underlaid with some more of those heavy riffs, including some sombrero inducing brass and Spanish guitar lines, alongside Wakeman type keyboards and hard rock guitar solo lines – I did say this album is a smorgasbord of influences! It is embedded below.
Cuervos Nocturnos is Night Crows and the same female lead voice as the last track takes charge in a Spanish operatic drama with bizarre brass and effects. Towards the end, if you can possibly imagine Carmen on speed infused with Motorhead, you might be somewhere near the mark.
It is followed by Hamáhólo’ Ogo. The theme I wrote above of seeing another’s woe and grief is repeated on this, thus bringing us a theme of, I believe, empathy between differing cultures and beliefs. The voices on this are astounding, and the drums are also very powerful in a track full of Arctic impact.
Twelve Valiant Saints is taken, I believe, from a nineteenth century English hymn by Reginald Heber, The Son of God Goes Forth to War (they love this type of thing in chapel where I live in the remnants of Presbyterian Wales). It might, therefore, surprise you to learn that the spirit of this track is dripping with Americana, but the words soon make it clear that this is a playful “homage” to the MAGA movement initiated by one Donald J Trump Esq., so this is satire wrought large, very clever, and very good as well. It is embedded below.
Pictures (Part II) is a brief, beautiful classical music piece, an orchestral delight.
Sermon for the Wastelands is Covid set to music and words. It is extraordinarily harsh, hard, dripping with social commentary and anger, the dark riffs and chords perfectly accompanying the words. Some passages are deliberately taking church service norms. This is not a track which makes for comfortable listening and is certainly not for fans of the way our government lied and blustered its way through the pandemic period.
L’Avare is The Miser. I can only describe this as a playful French piece with more than a passing nod to some of Supertramp’s lighter moments but infused with modern euro electronic pop.
We close with An Die Musik (To the Music), a very short operatic pastiche, in which we are transported to a better world.
Novo Deus is not an easy listen, and it is clearly not meant to be. You can sample it on Bandcamp at https://cyraxprog.bandcamp.com/album/novo-deus As a musical and lyrical pilgrimage, it is very good. There are moments of beauty, and these are interspersed with some deeply disturbing themes. It is never anything less than interesting, and I do thoroughly recommend that you give it a couple of listens to allow it to infuse itself and its strange world in you.
