First Impressions: Riders of the Canyon by Riders of the Canyon

The latest outing from Catalonian singer-songwriter Joana Serrat isn’t a sumptuous set of windswept soliloquies, a la Hardcore From the Heart, but a potent partnership with Irish singer-songwriter Matthew McDaid and fellow Catalonians Victor Partido and Roger Usart. Riders of the Canyon is the name of their band, album and the album’s title song: “Hold on to your footsteps/My dear companion/And listen to the sorrows/of the Riders of the Canyon.” 

Ghosts literal and figural inhabit the grooves. The music conjures the Byrds, Flying Burrito Brothers and Desert Rose Band, among others, while the principals lay bare the specters that haunt them. It’s one part folk-rock, one part country-rock, and all parts good.

Love and loss, sometimes connected and sometimes not, accent the bulk of the songs, which interlock like pieces of a tantalizing puzzle. Five of the tracks are known quantities, of course, dating from the self-titled EP the band released about this time last year. (In fact, the second half is that EP in full.) The new additions flesh out the picture. The opening “Master of My Lonely Time,” written and sung by Serrat, floods the brain’s synapses with dopamine, the result of her luscious vocals, the driving beat, and the incendiary guitar work of Midlake’s Joey McClellan, who—along with Midlake drummer McKenzie Smith—co-produced four of the 10 tracks with the band. How and why the song isn’t in heavy rotation on AAA radio here in the States is a mystery.

McDaid’s masterful “Dirty Water” is a powerful parable sung by the walking dead—no, not that walking dead, but rather a front-line soldier who may or may not have already lost his life. It’s impossible to escape one’s fate. (That’s how I hear it, at any rate.) Partido steps to the microphone for the breezy yet bittersweet “Here in My Dreams,” which finds him escaping into fantasy to avoid a long-ago hurt. “Everything Blooms in the Spring,” written by Serrat and David Giménez, features Usart on lead vocal whiles the others, as they do elsewhere, provide exquisite harmonies; it digs into how dormant love isn’t reborn along with nature’s flowers and foliage come the spring: “It’s spring, everything blooms/Why am I not reborn within you?/In spring everyone celebrates/But the winter in me is what’s left.” Partido’s upbeat “Downtown” provides a needed lift even if the lyrics are bleak; it evokes the Burritos’ “Christine’s Tune” to my ears. 

In short, Riders of the Canyon is a sublime set that resonates deep in the soul. Give it a go.