Lost in RockCanvas |
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Without even hearing a note I can surmise that this is probably the most avant-garde style of heavy music to ever emanate from the "Blade…" The latest, and apparent last recording from English Art-Rock specialist's sounds like a dysfunction of discordance and misled melodies… Canvas' style is indeed "lost" as their title indicates where songs like "Black Shape of The Nexus" and "Hail the Sky" for openers run off like a well spring of directionless dissonance that defy description in most cases, settling nowhere in particular within a cavalcade of sounds and ranges more in line with demonstrative noise and widened use of instrumentalist folly. More in line I would think with the many late talents bred from such industrious and adventurous indie housings as Solid State or Revelation Records, Canvas in the literal is a background smudged and splattered with idiosyncratic ideals and indigenous patterns that not only go against the grain in most cases but unusually consumed and exhumed for later analysis-of which there can be none. This is beyond the scope of what many of us have come to expect by standardized rock and metal form and thus there are few characteristic properties outside of early dictations and introductory passages that lead one down the road of expectancy only to be led far off course moments after. "Elephant Shoes," chosen here simply for its title, but as with the rest, a muddled mess of tormenting guitar riffs and extracurricular noise features out of step and scale with the perceived notion of musicality… "Lost in Rock" is, to be somewhat redundant, a technically advanced and atmospheric foray into the other side of perception-a generally dark passage with flashes of brilliant light that yield little in the way of illuminative properties, but ruminative however, to the extreme, while only allowing for small steps toward finality in a full spectral journey toward that ever widening expanse of inconclusiveness. Released by Metal Blade Records
GmbH, P.O. Box 1332, 73054 Eislingen, Germany. Review by Vinnie Apicella [va85@columbia.edu]
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