Flying Canyon

Billed as "California doom folk” and "like the Eagles on Robitussin,” Flying Canyon’s self-titled debut certainly comes as advertised. Led by grey-bearded Cayce Lindner, the Canyon deliver an album of deathly slow acoustic songs that seem the antithesis of Devendra Banhart and company’s recent freak-flag-flyin’ acid folk revival. Songs like "Down To Summer” and "This Can’t Be My Home” reveal the Golden State’s latent dark side, while "The Dawn Curtain” rolls like a ghostly echo down from the California mountains. Elsewhere, the ethereal "Relover” achieves a kind of stately grace, while "Gibraltar May Fall” finds Lindner approximating Neil Young at his most vulnerable. The warts-and-all recording technique only serves to add to the sense of fragility, particularly on the impossibly delicate album closer "At Night When the World Goes Quiet,” in which the listener keeps expecting to hear a string break amidst an almost otherworldly near-silence.