THE POWERS

Cyren

**** 1/2

I have rarely had the pleasure of listening to an album so wonderful as Cyren, 
and I have never heard such a promising debut in my years as a critic. With over 
a year's experience as a bar band in the western Scrapyard, members Alita 
(keyboards, vocals, programming) and Kimji (technical support) have succeeded 
in uniting the romantic and dangerous world of the bounty hunter with the 
everyday sounds of popular music. Songwriter Alita shows herself to be a true 
architect of the art. The album begins with Stillborn and Resurrected, an 
instrumental that begins with a simple melody and builds, or degenerates, into a 
discordantly energetic dance. Without allowing time for breath comes The One 
You Know, a young girl's statement of her independence to the parents she loves. 
This theme of courage in the face of adversity continues into I Walk in Faith:

Diving underground
See what I have found
He who taunts me he who wants me to submit beneath his will.
Born without a name
Died within the flame
Scars my spirit must not fear it lives within me still....

After reaching a furious climax, the music takes a somber turn with the dirge The 
Boy who Fell for Me, a tale of a love gone tragically wrong. Alita meditates further 
on its meaning in Ambition: 

Staring at the sun will blind you in the eyes
to the beauty of the world at your feet
You'd only just begun to hear someone else's cries
before you learned the meaning of defeat...

Lifting the album out of the sad depths it had been in comes the coldly beautiful, 
electrifying Edge of Steel. Here Alita blends sampled guitars with the precision of 
synthesizer music to create a feeling of energy devoid of sympathy; a sensation 
like desiring to accomplish an end by any means (Alita should be singled out for 
her innovative use of a crowd's shouting as a wavelike percussion sound). 
Guitars make an appearance again on the driving Against Your Arms. This song 
tells of a conflict between not black and white, but two shades of gray:

In the middle of a spectrum we are tied together
In conflict, in love, in the game we play
We circle, we duel, we need to face each other
It seems the only truth we know, to carry on this way...

The penultimate song, Mea Culpa, is perhaps the most unusual. This is the story 
of a man who pursues a woman--"follow[ing] you into The Pit where the sane 
would never go"--only to realize, when he meets her, that the only thing he can 
say is "Goodbye". The melody, a solo piano that builds to an orchestral climax 
and finishes as it began, more than compensates for the peculiarity of the subject, 
and provides a brilliant work-up for the conclusion, I, Domination:

It is I, Domination,
Your spring of salvation
My love it will baptize, and wash your soul pure
Your armor of a lifetime
Provide absolution
I'm standing beside you to make you secure...

Truly, an album not to be missed. We have only the highest expectations for the 
future for this capable band.
--reviewed by Nikki for Factory 50 Entertainment Review