Canon Blue Colonies

Canon Blue
Colonies
(Sensory Projects/Inertia)

Colonies is very much a record of our time. It is the first from Nashville songwriter a lange sohne watch singer and bedroom producer Daniel James aka Canon Blue and it engenders the wonderful dichotomies of the contemporary cultural and technological epoch.

Echoing with both acoustics and electronics folk-based song-structure and software-aided abstraction dior la d de dior watches this is a record of intimate scale and vast sonic scope; of antiquated instruments and shiny new laptops. Over 11 plaintive tracks (the Australian edition comes with four extra cuts from a previous EP) James seamlessly merges hooky minor-key folk-pop with subtly complex and layered electronic arrangements his soft-focus high-register vocal inflection a stunning constant throughout.

There are several highlights each riddle with James non-linear lyrical meanderings. Nothin ever feels right when you got a knife in the back of your head he croons on the anthemic Odds and Ends. But you get the feeling that James song-craft has yet to reach its full potential at a bare-bones level. The melodies and motifs composed entirely on his grandmothers upright piano apparently written at a time of great tragedy are strong but perhaps a little less than memorable than youd hope.

Its the arrangements that really give this record its strength. The stuttering beats twinkling piano and angelic Thom Yorke-esque falsetto of opener Tree House replica piaget watch the sticky beats and twittering rhythmic underlays of Mother Tongue and the shambolic Modest Mouse-isms of the rambling Battle Hymn each make for fine moments.

The frill-less sturdiness of James song writing vision aside what makes Colonies so effective is its constant eschewal of mode and palette. Folkie meanderings are swallowed into swathes of textural ambience; plonking piano keys are lost to storms of white noise; densely layered arrangement splay out into spacious space-pop.

It is a record lost in the abstraction between the intimate and the endless the organic and the synthesised and as such it feels a vital and uniquely contemporary debut.


Dan Rule