Author: Rok Klemše
Artist: Canyon Observer, The
Label: Kapa Records
Release: year_month
Runtime: 39:54
Rating: 4/5
After two warmly received EPs, Chapter 1: The Current of Her Ocean Brings Me To My Knees (2011) and Chapter 2: These Binds Will Set You Free (2012), Ljubljana’s The Canyon Observer are writing a new chapter of their story with the full-length debut FVCK. Among others, Scott Evans (Neurosis), who handled the mix, and James Plotkin (Khanate, OLD, Isis), who mastered the album, helped write that story sonically. And FVCK is finally the story that has taken The Canyon Observer to Cuba, where they’re playing the last of eight shows today!
That tour and the laurels the guys have been collecting lately aren’t just some automatic reward, because FVKC is a painfully obvious step up from their earlier little records, and you can hear every bit of effort, hard work and grind this collective has put in. Right from the start of the record the sonic waves hit like a tsunami, and Luscious Red leads you into the red room of Twin Peaks, where sludge, black metal, noise and post metal melt into one, soaked in a thick atmosphere of psychedelic nightmares and acid trips that could easily have come from the pen of William S. Burroughs or Hunter S. Thompson. If nothing else, FVCK is definitely one of the most intense musical coituses in recent memory. Across all four acts of the album, The Canyon Observer meander through variety and dynamics, building it all out of extremes: at one pole they erupt into full-on black metal excesses, at the other you forget about time and space in long, hypnotic instrumental passages.
The instrumental side of the album is simple only on the surface, because there’s much more hiding beneath that seemingly single-layered image. The distorted guitar riffs are devastating and doom-laden in their simplicity, yet on the flip side they palpably get lost in calm, dissonant touches that come close to Isis in places. Despite the chaos, you can hear that the individual parts weren’t thrown into the songs at random but are there on purpose, which is mostly down to the solid, roaring rhythm section, a mighty skeleton hiding under a layer of blood and flesh. Deep bass and repetitive, quake-like, almost tribal drumming sit beneath the thunder of guitars and vocals as the carriers of a shamanic connection to nature, which makes them somehow the strongest element, the one that pushes the listener into a state of trance. A trance from which Matic Babič’s animal vocals then cruelly rip you out. They’re without a doubt one of the most brutal elements of The Canyon Observer and complement the whole thing exceptionally well. Babič delivers a monstrous performance full of piercing screams and brutal growls, while Gašper’s dreamy, clean vocals complement him as the exact opposite. FVCK closes with the almost fifteen-minute complex and epic finale All of Her, Mine, which contains everything that makes The Canyon Observer unique. In it the band leaps from one extreme to the other and hops without much trouble from black metal explosions to slowed-down, dreamlike sequences of repeating guitar patterns, until they tear out one last message fitting the album’s atmosphere, a misanthropic, screamed-over-and-over »Kill Yourself!«
Is FVCK the band’s magnum opus? Absolutely, because it’s not easy to find an album where two seemingly totally incompatible extremes complement each other, merge and flow into one another this well. After its forty minutes FVCK leaves you emotionally wrecked and exhausted, but once the chaos of brutal tsunamis has shredded you to pieces, it also knows how to gently stroke you with the calm foaming of waves.
The Canyon Observer will wrap up their Cuban tour on March 1, 2016, at Gala hala!
Lineup
Simon Intihar – drums
Nik Franko – bass
Miloš Miloševič – guitar
Gašper Letonja – guitar
Matic Babič – vocals
Production
Jernej Černalogar
Tracklist
1. Luscious Red
2. Bounds Tied Tight
3. Lost In Silence
4. All of Her, Mine
