Cynic, Intronaut, Dysrhythmia at the Venue July 26th presented by Live Nation

Have we established that I'm a huge prog nerd? Good. Here's three progressive metal bands I saw in one night.

Dysrhythmia's music is hard to describe without coming off like a pretentious idiot. Since that's what I am, I'll give it a try for your conveniance. It's dissonant, bass-driven instrumental math metal with a fairly obvious avant-garde jazz influence. Autrement dit, it's an assault that sounds somewhere between the Fucking Champs on another awesome tangent, Coalesce-style non-shitty mathcore and Behold... the Arctopus (appropriately enough, six-string bassist Colin Marston is Behold...'s Warr guitarist).How did I like it? Quite a bit. Such music functions quite well live both because the group's precision seems organic and because the drum patterns suck you in.
While they aren't as hypnotic as Russian Circles or as cheerfully confident as Scale the Summit, Dysrhythmia mostly held my interest, and I'm now keen on checking out the recorded music. The night was off to a good start.

It would only get better. Intronaut took the stage and won me over shortly after. Like many other self-styled "progressive" bands, they play 3/4 "heavy" parts and 1/4 "calm" parts, but unlike their peers they manage to stretch their lulls into truly meaningful moments thanks in part to some fantastic bass melodies. One could compare them to Between the Buried and Me, but only in a favourable sense.
There isn't much of a visual aspect to Intronaut's show: it is very much just four guys focusing on their music, and as the night wore on that proved to be perfect. Sometimes, it's better to just have the music and no other distractions. Despite having a few annoying samples between songs, the set was highly enjoyable, and it ended with me as a fan.

This was my second time seeing Cynic this year, proving that I have a fantastic life. Their show, in contrast to their openers, had an obvious visual element. Standing atop a darkened stage, surrounded by smoke and projection screens and illuminated by blue and purple lights, the band ripped through all of their classic '93 full-length Focus front-to-back (with some excellent samples between songs that helped to explain the concept behind each), then proceeded to play most of Traced in Air and two songs off of their recent Re-traced experimental EP, totalling an impressive 90 minutes by the end of the night. If you missed this one, you screwed up. Don't screw up again: see Cynic the next time you have the chance. This was in the top five shows I've seen in the past year, and I've seen a lot of shows. Posted: Aug 16, 2010