There’s a Fountain in the Fire by Canyon Country (Review)
Written and recorded by Freescha’s Nick Huntington, Canyon Country’s There’s a Fountain in the Fire revels in its expansive sounds. Every sound on here seems bathed and soaked in echo and delay. This is music to accompany sunsets, preferably sunsets far out in the desert, where sundowns suffuse everything around them in a dusky red light before fading away and making room for the moon and stars. At times, it’s surprising that these compositions even resemble songs, considering how loose they are, and how much space exists within them.
But that spaciousness, that expansive nature, is both the disc’s most beguiling element and its most frustrating.
“Setting Sun” cribs a drone or two from Flying Saucer Attack’s pastoral phase, albeit with a fraction of the tape hiss and distortion. Huntington sings as if he’s taking a country stroll, picking out a lovely little melody on the ol’ acoustic guitar while drones begin to gather around him like so many evening shadows. However, the song is only two minutes long, so it fades away before it’s had time to coalesce into something truly substantial.
The incurving, backwards-looping drones on “Like Water From My Eyes” certainly have a poignancy about them — while you’re listening to the track, that is. But a few minutes later, when you’re listening to the Verve-esque “Without a Sound” (think that first self-titled EP rather than Urban Hymns), you’ll probably have forgot about them.
The issue here is that the CD seems focused on these ethereal sounds purely for their own sake, without adding much emotional heft to them. The most memorable songs on the disc, such as “Honey & Gold” or “Dead Or Dreaming,” are memorably precisely because there’s an aching emotional bent to them that dovetails with the gorgeous sounds Huntington and Co. create. That, and they last longer than a mere minute or two, and have a chance to develop and grant the drifting sounds some heft and substance.
On “Honey & Gold,” Huntington weds his pastoral sounds — all gauzy guitars and blurred, half-awake vocals — with some surprisingly effective and delicate lyrical imagery, as if he composed it one lazy Saturday morning while lying in bed with a lover. The result is a song that sticks with you well after There’s a Fountain in the Fire is over, something that is difficult to say about much of the disc’s content.
In the moment, each song is as lovely as you could hope for, but it’s insubstantial, ultimately fading away without leaving much of an impact. True, some might find that to be a poignant experience. But some of us will find it more frustrating than anything else, and will be left hoping that Canyon Country’s next recording will possess a slightly more substantial kind of beauty.