Soft Canyon

Oh what a happy accident! Seldom does one stumble across a record that (a year after its release) grabs you by the ears and forces you to listen… Well folks, here is one such record. The wonderfully entitled Broken Spirit, I Will Mend Your Wings deserves reviewing, it would have done a year ago on its Canadian release, or thirty years ago if some bright spark had sat down to record it then, so frankly why not mention it now! Too many good things go unnoticed, and although at a mere 33 minutes, this isn't the longest record in the world, it is a winner.

You don't often hear albums that actually merit accolades like ‘timeless', but for once the press release has got it right. Soft Canyon are inexplicably able to weave together a whole host of postmodern signifiers into a brew that, in the space of half an hour, takes you on an all encompassing tour of late sixties and early seventies rock – you name it, they do it:: CSN&Y, Pink Floyd (pre Dark Side…), Free, Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Doors et al. It's actually a bit like listening to the soundtrack to ‘Almost Famous', but better.

The only issue (you might think) is that loads of people have done this before, which in fairness they have, but Soft Canyon are one of the few bands that make retro work by pulling it firmly into the Twenty-first Century. Indeed, Soft Canyons only let themselves down on a couple of tracks, namely ‘Hope's Great Divide' which sounds too much like a Soundtracks Of Our Lives outtake, and the twee 'With My Back to the Sun'. Other than that, the spacious production of ‘Kaleidoscope Mountain' and the raw emotion of ‘Sunflight' point to a band that are highly accomplished, and are able to inject something quite individual into music that could have sounded jaded and overtly nostalgic.

Soft Canyons' music embodies a dream or aspiration, and thereby bypasses obvious nostalgia and sentimentality – they are the proverbial kid that stands in front of the mirror, lo-slung electric guitar in hand, kicking rock ‘n' roll butt, hoping that he will one day sound like whoever happens to be on the radio; haven't we all been there? Soft Canyons' songs are all the more rewarding for resembling the records they (and we) dearly love… so please, let's hear some more of this soon. An old record in more ways than one, but who cares?