Sitting with the five members of Canopies at their recording space inside a south side warehouse, it’s almost immediately clear why the band took three and a half years to release a follow-up to its excellent, bubbly synth-pop self-titled debut EP. After I ask a question, a brief silence will fill the room, when it seems like each member is waiting for someone else to answer, perhaps unwilling to blurt out the wrong thing on behalf of the band. But that uneasiness doesn’t linger long. We eventually get rolling as the guys grow more comfortable and their responses become more confident, leading to open discussions about their craft.
Unlike the interview’s initial awkwardness, Maximize Your Faith, Canopies lush, magnanimous full-length debut, displays zero glimpses of apprehension and delicately expands on the dreamy psychedelia that was merely hinted at throughout its earlier work. The album achieves the rare feat where every track could effectively work as a lead single.
But the songs don’t simply retread the same territory; rather the bright flourishes behind “Miss You Now” and the kaleidoscopic lense of “Choose Yer Own Adventure” sound remarkably different than the charismatic, M83-esuqe beats on “The Plunders and the Pillagers” and the bedroom pop of “Sparkle and Hum.” The band has duly received heaps of mainstream press for this ebullient effort, from wide-reaching outlets like NME, Entertainment Weekly, Stereogum, and Spin, where the album streamed exclusively a week before its release.
The sure-handedness of Maximize Your Faith didn’t just come about naturally; it took months of dedicated work to achieve that calculated result. And the extended gap between releases seems much more reasonable when you take into account that the band still needed to find extra hands (multi-instrumentalist Jake Brahms and guitarist-keyboardist ZW joined the fold following the release of the EP) and that they built their songs through a democratic and methodical process.
“A lot of the recording sessions were all five of us sitting in this room and trying to agree on every little thing that was happening, down to the synth tones that we were using,” says ZW, who wanted to be referred by that alias and also performs under the solo moniker, Babes, a project that originally released “Sparkle and Hum” in 2012.
The bulk of the basic tracking was laid down at The Analog Kitchen in Walker’s Point, but the band returned to its own studio to fuss over the details.
“We’re not like a live band where there’s a drummer, a guitar player, a bass player, a singer and you play live then you do overdubs,” keyboardist/singer John Marston says. “It’s basically drums and then overdub everything else with millions of layers.”
While you can imagine the persistent headaches that arguments over minute changes would spark, Maximize Your Faith never sounds heavy-handed or overly indulgent. The spaced-out synthesizers bob and weave seamlessly, and not as if all five guys have their hands stuck in the cookie jar.
“During recording we would imagine Halle Berry as Barbarella,” recalls Brahm, easily the most lighthearted of the bunch. “That got us through a lot of difficult moments.”
Canopies fittingly decided to pair its otherworldly sound with the cosmic 18th-Century drawings from the neoclassic French architect-turned-artist Étienne-Louis Boullée. They stumbled on the series of cenotaphs in somewhat embarrassing fashion—“saw it on a 14-year-old girl’s Tumblr blog, and we just fell in love with it instantly,” admits Brahm. Despite this, the images invite the viewer to ask big questions about our role in the universe.
“That’s what the artwork does especially well. Looking into this thing but also reaching out and beyond,” drummer Craig Leren says. “That’s the reason why he designed it. It’s supposed to be this place that you came into to observe the universe. To reach beyond, outside of just what the structure is.”
Canopies remains mum on the meaning behind the album title, which was lifted from a “Choose Yer Own Adventure” lyric, hoping that the material induces disparate, personal responses.
“I like when art is left for you to interpret, for you to ruminate on and put your own meaning to it,” guitarist-vocalist Nolan Treolo says. “I think it becomes more powerful if you can attach your own values and meaning to something. Not hit someone over the head with it.”
Now that the album is finally available, the band wants to move on to honing its live performance, an approach that at first seemed daunting before scaling back on all the antiquated equipment.
“We were analog gear snobs at the beginning. We didn’t want to have a computer on stage. We wanted to show off our old synthesizers,” Marston says. “But when you’re playing a stage the size of Cactus Club, it’s kind of chaotic, so we were able to use a computer to be the brain of all the sound effects. It’s more complex and it’s more streamlined. It is slightly easier now than in the beginning when the main keyboard sampler was this Akai rack sampler from the mid-‘90s that ran on floppy disc.”
“That was kind of unreliable,” Marston says. “So we stepped up to the 21st
Century, well, a hybrid of the 21st Century.”Canopies celebrates a release party with opener The Fatty Acids and visual effects by Breadmothers at the Polish Falcon, 801 E. Clarke St., this Friday, December 12. Doors open at 9 p.m. and tickets are $8. Maximize Your Faith is currently available for purchase off Minneapolis label Forged Artifacts and can be streamed below.
