If you Google "Cloudland Canyon," you'll have to do a bit of scrolling in order to find anything related to the psychedelic drone-pop band. Instead, you'll be greeted with images of awe-inspiring vistas and crystalline waterfalls captured at Georgia's Cloudland Canyon state park. The connection makes some sense, especially when you consider how different Cloudland Canyon are from other bands in their sphere. On their last release, 2008's Lie In Light, Kip Ulhorn (ex-Panthers) and Simon Wojan (King Khan and the Shrines) erected monolithic walls of sound that suggested warmth, sunlight, and melting landscapes instead of melting faces.
With their fourth proper full-length Fin Eaves, Cloudland Canyon seem set to make you work a little bit harder for your bliss. Here they add additional players and swapping the enveloping production of Lie In Light for scratchy washes of dry noise and stormy atmospherics that contribute a deeper sense of mystery to the project. There is still joy in the project, as something as simple as a rising bassline or a grainy synth layer or even the shake of a tambourine can come across as strangely beautiful. And all this despite the fact that most of Fin Eaves is covered in a light crackle, as if the music were testing positive for radiation. Sometimes this intentional sonic obstruction makes the blooming wooziness underneath feel more seductive than a surface listen would suggest.
The album's more percussive back half alludes to the Jesus and Mary Chain (like on the foggy, disorienting roll of "Pinklike", before its clean, electronic coda reveals itself) and labelmates Wooden Shjips ("Mothlight Pt. 2"), but Fin Eaves is most clearly defined by its opening track. "No One Else Around" mixes discordant pieces of light humming, corroding electronic bell-tones, junky drums, and waves of arid white noise, and each element collides in a scatterbrained fashion. But over the course of its six minutes, these pieces begin to align and snap together. Throughout Fin Eaves, the kaleidoscopic growth of the tracks feels both natural and chaotic, and you get a good sense of the sounds and patterns evolving.
Sometimes the album's lo-fi and static-ridden production can induce a dulling sensation. As good as something like "Sister" already is, you can't help but wonder what a perfect late-night driving song it could be if only that haunting melodica and female vocal had the chance to stand out. But part of the reason why most of Fin Eaves works is because of the close listening required to break into its lush interior.
