Album Review :: Canopies - Maximise Your Faith

Canopies

Maximise Your Faith

December 12 2014 (Forged Artifacts)

7 /10

Words: Richard O’Hagan

There’s a slight sense of bad timing about Canopies’ debut album. Had it been out a month earlier, it would’ve been the perfect soundtrack to the Rosetta comet landing mission, so ethereal and spacious is their sound. It is easy to imagine the little Philae lander drifting down to the strains of a track like ‘The Year of Jubilee’, indeed you’d probably be happy to be stranded on a comet for eternity listening to that one track alone.

Of course, spacey, blippy, bleepy music is hard to sustain over a period of time, yet as an album it works better when Canopies don’t try to do anything too different. When they try to do something a little different, as on ‘Miss You Now’, or try to adopt a harder, more up-tempo, style (‘Sparkle and Hum’), things just don’t work as well.

The standout track is latest single ‘Choose Yer Own Adventure’, which buzzes and fizzes like someone packed a thirty minute firework display into four minutes. Those looking for something more mainstream, a little more Disclosure-esque, won’t be disappointed by ‘The Plunderers and the Pillagers’, and it is something of a testament to the five-piece’s depth and range that much-loved lead single ‘Getting Older’ is actually one of the weaker tracks here.

Canopies have made a lot of their Milwaukee roots and how happy they are living there, but on this evidence there’s no such limit to their endeavour.