Detailed Reviews [Hyacintus - 2008 - "Sinkronos"]

Prolusion. After a five-year hiatus, Argentina’s HYACINTUS is back with “Sinkronos”, which is their third release, following “Fantasia en Concerto” (2003) and “Elydian” (2002).

Analysis. “Sinkronos” pales in comparison with any of Hyacintus’s previous albums although, of course, it’s still the project’s founder, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Jacinto Corral, who is behind all the music and lyrics here, too. Despite featuring several musicians, at least nominally, the recording has a rather strong homemade quality to it, and I’m pretty sure that quite a few of the ten tracks presented are performed by Jacinto alone. This musician is indeed a kind of one-man ensemble, equally skilled in playing electric, acoustic and bass guitars, keyboards as well as various stringed instruments, but anyone else’s performance capabilities as such weigh nothing actually. Previously, I have been closing my eyes to the relative flatness of Hyacintus’s sound. This time, however, the problem instantly comes to the surface, as on most of this outing’s tracks it appears to be combined with another flaw, namely the straightforwardness of its musical thinking, to say the least. Additionally, there is a strong synthetic, at times even plastic-like, feel to all the implied pieces (due to Corral’s bad choice re synthesizer registers, particularly those ‘responsible’ for imitating strings and drums), although a lot of the soloing lines are provided by acoustic guitar and piano. The three instrumentals that the CD begins with, Mission Dada, Hipno Delfico and Ritual Lunar, are all groovy, basically either mono- or bi-thematic, pseudo-art-rock pieces, abounding in “ooh” synthesizer choir pads whose exclusively heroic ‘nature’ makes this, originally fairly primitive, music sound almost comical. The last-named track contains some real vocalizations as well, but since the singer most often strictly follows the parts of the virtual choir, the end result isn’t too convincing, either. Sueno-2 is the same story altogether, save the fact that it features some lyrics-based singing, on the part of Jacinto himself, and I must tell you it would have been much better if the man had handled all the vocals on his own, without any side participants in this field, all of whom are women, BTW. Just listen to Implacable Kronos which, so to speak, rocks throughout, but exclusively on its instrumental plane, whereas vocally it only brings to mind an odd stylistic mishmash. However, the highest disappointments would be Explore and Vesenevi, both of which are featureless, mono-dimensional, pieces with only keyboards in the arrangement. It didn’t dispense with drawbacks (see all the negative factors I named before I began describing the tracks) on the remaining three pieces either, but those are less striking here, partly thanks to a certain compositional diversity of these tracks, namely Sueno-1, Heart Place and Mission Recordada, though the latter is somewhat overextended as most of its second half is overloaded with Corral’s guitar histrionics. In the end, only the first two of these more or less fully suit my taste, each standing out for its floating acoustic passages with a certain folk and classical feeling, respectively.

Conclusion. “Sinkronos” finds the project’s main man experiencing a strong creative crisis, there being direct evidence of Corral’s lack of inspiration almost throughout the recording. Instead of having made an attempt to move towards mainstream Prog, he would have better relied on his old approach and even used his own cliches as a last resort. Then he would have at least remained within the niche he has built on his own. Get back to your roots, Jacinto, when you start thinking over the matter of the next Hyacintus release.

VM=Vitaly Menshikov: January 1, 2009
The Rating Room