Pitchfork

Talk about wearing your influences on your sleeve. Cloudland Canyon's second LP, Lie in Light, opens with a song called "Krautwerk", conflating a band and a genre so closely related that the pun verges on tautology. But Kraftwerk were futurists. Cloudland Canyon are more atavistically inclined, more Can than Kraftwerk. They want order within chaos, not instead of it, and on "Krautwerk", they mask their Krautrock homage in the Velvet Underground's patented blend of rock guitars and primordial ooze.

"Krautwerk" takes its time making its point: A long celestial blackout courts transcendental bliss, before the shaggy techno-organic rhythm, noodly guitars, and submerged incantations give shape to the void. At seven minutes, it also wears out its welcome before it departs, as it's hard to get into the song's liminal groove (which all of Cloudland Canyon's music strives to find) when the title's already told you exactly where it's going. Happily, Cloudland Canyon's Kip Uhlhorn (Panthers, Red Scare) and Simon Wojan (King Khan & the Shrines) veer away from the cumbersome Krautrock template for most of Lie in Light. But the sense that they're trying to lasso lightning persists, and unifies the otherwise-eclectic album. In naming themselves after a state park in Georgia, the band seems less interested in naturalistic allegory than the resonance of the words themselves: The image of a canyon filled with clouds is terrific shorthand for the vastness of their sound. On "White Woman", droning walls of shoegaze guitar feel at once impregnable and vaporous, like you could put your hand right through them. As noise-pop jams go, it's powerful; but like "Krautwerk", it feels a bit telegraphed, its intensity levels rising and falling exactly where you'd expect.

Bludgeoning stasis seems close to Cloudland Canyon's collective heart, yet when they loosen up and let their music move a little, they excel. Lie in Light really hits its stride with the third track, the spongy electro jam "You & I", which lets go of daunting stasis and finds the band tapping into a deep corporeal groove: I like hearing that spirit, the prioritization of the moment over posterity, that spontaneity and wantonness-- the record could use more of both. "You & I" is Lie in Light's unquestionable apex, and it's perfectly sequenced in the middle of the album: after an upward climb and a thrumming climax, we begin the downward slide into less blatantly ecstatic tracks. If you took three or four Angelo Badalamenti scores and layered them all on top of each other, you might wind up with something very similar to "Scheisse Schatzi, Auf Wiedersehen!", a sonic analog to a dissociative fugue. An idyllic krautrock passage flares up like a muscle memory amid the cosmic gusts of "Heme", and the impenetrable title track, all drones and concussions, slams down with apocalyptic finality: no discernible guitars, no isolated rhythms, no verbal semiotics, just a long, loud, obliterative ending.