A short trip to an immediate past. A moment deceptively frozen in our minds, but which is still beating, still with us as we walk alongside time. The Disappearance is an album of remembrance, of triumphant nostalgia that surrounds us for a good while with the feeling of being back when post-rock became a genre. It only makes the temporal distance evident as it reveals its warm, hopeful core, translucent beyond the veil of dramatic intensity. It is an honest, direct version of a type of expression that was better characterized by elaborated eloquence and mighty twenty-minute behemoths. In other words, Canyonsofstatic show us that they’re old-school; fortunately, ‘old-school’ is not, by any means, a synonym for ‘dated.’

The album follows a vague, create-it-yourself kind of theme, a musical narrative developed in a relatively vintage (but powerfully vivid) style that blends the introversive dreamscapes of shoegaze with the extroversive emotional inspiration of post-rock. “The Disappearance” wouldn’t sound out of place in a playlist full of early Explosions in the Sky and late Godspeed, but the truly appealing thing is that it wouldn’t sound strange in another mix full of present-tense post-rock either: its strength comes not from those particular deviations from a style we call innovation, but from a simple revitalization of the old battle standards of the genre; the focus is on sounds that move you, sounds which you can identify with at some level of your sentimental consciousness, giving the music value for its intent and scope. These drive the album ever forward, creating for us a journey which seems littered with bursts of peace, violence, and everything in between, but when we decide to turn around and see the path we’ve walked, we realize it was all part of the plan; this is a road that tricks us into believing we are building its course with every step we take, until we stop and realize we’re not the first ones to have taken it.

“Shelter” is a vibrant example of this sudden irruption of self-awareness; the sweet shoegaze melody introducing the piece becomes the base of post-rock riffing in a layered, progressive fashion, reaching a point where it apparently begins anew, this time incorporating the intensity of the latter genre, luring the listener into going with the flow. It proceeds to slow down and settle in… until the shelter is struck by disaster, a dynamic and dramatic force breaking the sense of lazy comfort and hitting us with three minutes of a reluctant awakening. An awakening that makes us listen harder and find the wonderfully-crafted articulation of sounds that the tight relationship between the different instruments have developed; the guitar wails as the keyboard keeps its head level, balancing the music as the drums set up a potent march-like rhythm and the bass gives the wall of sound a graver voice. No sound is wasted, no instrument left behind.

This is how the spirit of post-rock lives on in The Disappearance, re-presented as music with the capability of covering all ranges of emotion, of reaching out into your self and revealing it to the world around you. This is how Canyonsofstatic state that this is not a genre that has been explored completely; this is how they take “classic” post-rock back into relevance, on the humble premise of “trying to explore the music and shape it in ways we have never done before,” as the band said in a past interview with the Silent Ballet. Canyonsofstatic are the proof that this style hasn’t been overdone, it just hasn’t been done right; it hasn’t been done proper justice… until now.