Sidelining

Artful Winnipeg quintet Royal Canoe return with Sidelining, their fifth full-length album. Now over a decade into their career, the band have earned a reputation for intelligent, hyper-detailed production and a seemingly endless genre mishmash that continually serves to banish them out into the pop hinterlands. If there is any consistency within this group, its their stubborn resistance to cohesion. As with Royal Canoes previous efforts, Sidelining comes across as a braided river of competing parts and concepts that occasionally unites into a single tributary. For this set, an intentional decision was made to eschew any pre-existing ideas and enter the studio with an entirely blank slate. Improvising and writing together in the studio can be a risky but rewarding endeavor for any band. In this case, the approach more or less results in Royal Canoe sounding like Royal Canoe. The title-track opener benefits from a minimalist dark groove and rather bewitching melody, after which the album stretches out into a nest of stuttering rhythms, vocoder abuse, loungey electro-soul, and idea-board pastiche. There are plenty of cool sounds and samples to be heard, especially on cuts like Summer Stay and the skittering, robotic HAL. ~ Timothy Monger