Send "Canyons " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Consequenceofsound |
 Australians Ryan Grieve and Leo Thomsen, also known as production duo Canyons, have remixed everyone from Ladyhawke to The Juan MacLean, but they’re just now finally getting around to releasing a debut LP of original music. In order to accomplish their weirdo electronic vision, they’ve drafted members of Nite Jewel, The Embassy, Sniff ‘n the Tears, and Tame Impala. Keep Your Dreams attempts to pull off a nearly impossible feat: trying to somehow combine the shamanistic grandiosity of MGMT with the electro-pulse of !!!. The strange thing is that they come pretty close to achieving that on a few tracks.The chuckling, soaring synth arcs of “Circadia” open the album on an epic note, a less terrifying, more ’80s version of something off of Fuck Buttons’ first disc. The wobbling synth, poly-rhythmic drumming, flopping bass, and skronking saxophone come together in a slinking, dance floor-aimed jam. In the right mood, this sort of huge, wacky set piece could be a lot of fun, but it rides right up to the edge of cheesy, a recurring problem throughout the album. “My Rescue” might be the strongest track, its chugging bass and rattling drums melding with disco synths and bongos. “I wanna lose my mind in you,” the vocals croon right before a flashy guitar solo. On this track, the blend between revival and modernity is just right. On “See Blind Through” (featuring heavily effected vocals from Nite Jewel’s Ramona Gonzalez), the ’80s plinks and hums are all too familiar, something that’s been in nightclubs for nigh on 30 years....full text |
| Cmj |
| It feels like Australian music is popping up everywhere. Artists like Cut Copy, Gotye and Boy And Bear have conquered their continent and have started to make their way into the ears of listeners overseas, and as of this month the Perth-born and Sydney-based duo known as Canyons will be joining them on the list of Australia’s rising stars. Canyons’ synth-heavy debut LP, Keep Your Dreams, takes a dramatic, M83-like approach to what might be disco or maybe indie rock. Whatever it may be, Keep Your Dreams does not end in the same territory in which it starts. The first few tracks churn up fast-paced, elastic electro underpinned by jangling tribal beats, but by the last song, “And We Dance,” the album has slowed down to accommodate a bit of sitar, a robust saxophone and a bubbling minimal beat. “And We Dance” is not only the last song on the album but the longest by more than a minute, giving Canyons time to build a sound that relies less on lyrics and danceable beats than its predecessors, like “Under A Blue Sky.” Keep Your Dreams is not the first release from Ryan Grieve and Leo Thomson, the Perth natives who make up Canyons. A few years ago, DFA released the 12″ single “Fire Eyes” for the duo and invited the guys to play a DFA boat party in New York, a trip that turned into a seven-stop tour across the U.S. It’s easy to see what DFA was drawn to in tracks like “See Blind Through” and “Sun And Moon”: a futuristic, retro disco aesthetic produced by a combination of dance beats and wailing saxophones and guitars....full text |
| Pitchfork |
| Bad timing that Canyons released Keep Your Dreams in the same year M83 and Cut Copy finally put out new albums. I've already read several naysayers make comparisons to both of those acts, in order to dismiss Canyons out of hand, but the connection strikes me as both obvious and inexact. True, Canyons have got a taste for the brittle and buzzing tones of early synthesizer music, just like Anthony Gonzalez and crew. And Canyons are interested in creating heart-stirring epics out bits of 1980s pop culture previously deemed off-limits because they were just too damn kitschy, same as M83 and the Cut Copy boys. But while Hurry Up, We're Dreaming and Zonoscope can sometimes bludgeon you with their need to be monumental, Keep Your Dreams follows a far more idiosyncratic path into much stranger and less immediately arena-pleasing places. For one thing, there's far more weirdo disco boogie, and early ambient house ala the Orb, and Toto-style sensitive dude rock in Canyons' sound. All those wobbly saxophone solos, for one thing. And the stoned hand percussion and jungle bird sound effects. The best tracks here aren't so much sweeping shoegaze/new wave classics-in-the-making as bedroom producer dance jams that keep sprouting all sorts of weird-pop moments as the beats roll on. When they're really on, Canyons are maximalists who seem pained to follow one idea to its conclusion when they can keep things mutating, unrepentant oddballs who still love a good earworm but would prefer to have three. Plus they thankfully have little truck with revisionist notions of good taste when it comes 80s dance music, which was often pretty great because it was so gauche. "Under a Blue Sky" is so unashamedly campy and overloaded with winning "bad" ideas retrieved from the dustbin of dance music history that it makes the DFA's rehabilitative aims sound downright acetic. Slap bass that's so clean and stiff it feels more robotic than fluidly funky? Check. A campy "menacing" vocalist, pitched-down Adonis-style, spouting suggestive French gibberish? Got it. Gritless "funk" guitar that makes Power Station sound like Muddy Waters? Yup. An elephant's trumpet call for the hell of it? Sure, why not. Canyons remix and get remixed by "acceptably" serious dance dons like DJ Harvey, but the high points of Keep Your Dreams revel in the unacceptable baubles of what was once mainstream pop. They remember that so much of 80s dance-pop blurred the line between novelty music and alien-sounding futurism....full text |
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