You've got to hand it to bargain-bin sample freaks Javelin for going that extra mile to make something special out of what other bands considered a toss-off. While the most anyone else did for Record Store Day 2011 was toss in a free t-shirt (okay, the Mars Volta had a puzzle up for grabs), Javelin treated their 10" EP release like a proper full-length. Or maybe something more. Taking inspiration from their travels through the American South and West, Canyon Candy is a brief little concept EP about the American frontier, stoking images of cowboys, coyotes, and miles of desert along the way. To really drive the point home, they even hand-branded each sleeve themselves. And then there's the accompanying Kickstarter-financed movie in the works, which promises to "employ old studio western methods such as rear-projection, dioramas, and scenic matte painting to create a stunningly unorthodox visual rendering of the American West." Cut them a check and you'll receive a limited edition playbutton-- a headphone jack-equipped sheriff's badge pre-loaded with the EP.
Weird, wild stuff indeed, but for those of us only relying on streaming a few of the tracks over at the Luaka Bop website, how does the music stand up to this (frankly overwhelming) amount of fanfare? If you couldn't already tell, a good deal of the fun lies within getting wrapped up in all the extras, and where gimmicks lie, usually so does inferior product. This certainly isn't the problem here-- staying true to the style Tom Van Buskirk and George Landford established on their quasi-mixtape Jamz n Jemz and debut No Mas, Canyon Candy is quirky without being overtly goofy, and the cheap, obscure samples are still cleverly mined and mixed into these trail-tested collages.
But with a strict theme to adhere to, Javelin can't afford themselves as much room to let their inhibitions run wild, and a lot of their experimental-pop giddiness is missing from these tracks. Everything here is pretty brief-- most tracks average between a minute-and-a-half to two minutes-- but the more developed songs still contain important transportative qualities without the aid of the impending cowboy film visuals. "Cowpoke"-- which shares a certain kinship with Beck-- and the sample-led "Estevez", which nicely conjures a stoned, rolling passenger seat view of America's still-wild regions, make the concept feel worth the effort.
What's most surprising here is how untouched a lot of these samples sound. Part of this could be that Javelin are really good at making new things sound vintage, but knowing their predilection for crate-digging, it's clear that this is more of a curatorial piece than a compositional one. Highlight "Strawberry Roan" is a welcome exception, more willing to layer and reconfigure its source elements to create something blissfully strange. But for the most part, the work seems to lie in how impressive the sample find ends up being. In turn, the most relevant musical touchstone on Canyon Candy isn't a musical one at all. It's pretty hard not to hear Quentin Tarantino's influence, considering his talent for plucking deep cuts and obscure pieces of music for his films and making them sound irrepressibly hip. Those holding out for another excitedly idiosyncratic offering for Javelin might be a little disappointed, but Canyon Candy does say something about their potential future in movie soundtracking. Whether the flick they're helping out with now is on the level of the spaghetti western QT has been rumored to be cracking on is a decidedly different story.
