Canyons - Keep Your Dreams

Canyons - Australian duo Ryan Grieve and Leo Thomson - seem like very busy people. They started their own record label, signed Tame Impala, remixed acts including Juan Maclean and !!! and, as Canyons, have signed for Modular Records.

Now comes Keep Your Dreams, an idiosyncratic exploration of a wide array of sounds and textures that pays no heed to fashion and is al the better for it. There are a head-spinning amount of styles thrown into the mix on this album with nearly as many guest vocalists (including Tame Impala, Nite Jewel, , Sniff ‘n the Tears and The Embassy). It makes for a record that never lacks imagination but does lack an identity and a clear focus.

The album sees them take ideas as far as they can stretch them - from house-beats, soulful-Dance and hypnotic vibes. It means they take extend their sounds but sometimes to aimless degrees. When it works it’s great – Under A Blue Sky is unashamedly camp, dancey and great, then there’s the Belearic-pop of When I See You Again and 80s Chicago house of See Blind Through.

Canyons have been compared to M83 and Cut Copy, but Keep Your Dreams is not as stylised or as enthral to the ‘cooler’ (for want of a better phrase) 80s sounds that those two acts use. There’s a lot of slap bass on here for one thing and many a sax solo, not to mention an elephant’s trumpet call. And that’s not a criticism. They bring to mind !!! playfulness and lack of worry about what the ‘in’ crowd think.

In patches this ethos works but far too often it is not the sum of its parts and it never reaches the dizzying heights that their peers attained. You’re left with an album that would be great fun live but needs reining on record.