Canvas Solaris "Spatial/Design" CD
[Tribunal]
Holy Cynic worship, Batman! On this EP this instrumental trio drops four lengthy tracks of tech metal mastery that takes heavy influences from Cynic, Atheist, and their ilk. Think lots of jazzy drumming with snazzy cymbal work, plenty of alternate picking riffs, unusual time signatures and changes, smooth clean breaks with some spacey sort of textures going on, quick lead breaks, and a lot of tasteful complexity. The songs are flawed in some respects, but the band is definitely not trying too hard to be technical. It's not complicated for the sake of being complicated, and that's a very good thing. I'd like to hear more tempo variation (namely more of the faster riffing that's all too scarce here) and more work with the solos (i.e. longer, more prominently arranged lead work), but beyond that this is a very nice EP. Really the only thing disturbing this CD is a very, very sadly ineffective recording. It pains me to hear such incredible musicianship and promising songwriting wasted with such a weak sound. The drums tend to sound fine, and I love the lush clean guitars, but there's about zero density here. The bass is usually hard as fuck to hear properly, the guitars are thin and somewhat distant (drums dominate for sure)... I don't know. They could get away with just cleaning up the guitar tone and making it more consistent (some of the lead lines have a rawer sort of bite), but I'd up the bass and make it more defined in there as well so that it could play off of the percussion. There are also some minor performance flaws, but barely... I'm not particularly bothered by the few slipups that I hear. The layout is simple and to the point. I like the metallic silver ink against the splash of spacey colors on the cover, though the font used for the band "logo" is pretty weak and inappropriate for their style of music. Inside the booklet everything is black and white with lots of mathematical equations and symbols, and unusual fragments of text such as, "Plato's logocentric bags unpacked for deconstructive amusement." Any band that can pull off Cynic worship is okay in my book, so even though the recording really does damage the end result and they still need some minor work in the areas of performance and variety, I still have to give this a solid rating. This is damn promising. Shit, I'd love to hear these dudes do a properly developed full-length. Another name to keep an eye on... (7/10)
Running time - 26:50, Tracks: 4
[Notable tracks: Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, The Non-Terminating Integer]
Tribunal Records - http://www.tribunalrecords.com

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