Jet Cemetery’s The Canary LP comes on like a strange transmission dug out of the dirt with bare hands, a record made by people who seem to understand that if the century is going to hand you dread, then you’d better answer back with rhythm, nerve, and a little spectral glamour.
The Austin duo of TaSzlin Trébuchet and Lars Wolfshield, both longtime artist-activists, have built something steeped in solidarity and spiritual unrest, the kind of album that wants to move your feet while it rummages through the ruins in your head. Out today on vinyl and digitally in Dolby Atmos, it carries itself with purpose, but never the stiff piety that so often kills records with lofty intentions.
“The album has two parts – one side inspires relaxation and reflection, the other side brings dance and joy,” says Trébuchet. “It’s something for all humans to enjoy during dark times.”
Wolfshield sharpens the point: “This record is about solidarity, and bravery, and hope. It’s about motion easing grief. It’s an ode to the strength of the human spirit, getting back to the earth and our roots, and coming together to bring about a better world.”
That tension between comfort and movement gives the album its shape. The Canary draws from late-80s and early-90s Detroit techno, apocalyptic sci-fi, fantasy, and indigenous/ Chicano traditions around the threshold between life and death, but it also carries a strong streak of dream-pop decadence and trip-hop unease. The reference points are all there in the bloodstream: the devotional drift of Cocteau Twins, the low-lit sensuality of Massive Attack, Björk’s fearless emotional elasticity, Enya’s celestial calm, and the eerie American unreality of David Lynch and The X-Files. None of that feels pasted on. It feels lived in.
Eagle Rider opens things with a wide, psychedelic sweep, weirdly beautiful harmonies, and the kind of vocal lift that makes Portishead feel like a useful parallel, especially if somebody slipped an Enya record into the after-hours fog. It is euphoric, but with a weird edge around the glow, like the song knows the sky above it might split open at any moment.
Embers is one of the album’s deepest cuts, turning cycles of desire, collapse, and self-reckoning into something urgent and unstable. Here the ghosts of Massive Attack, Portishead, Air, and Björk hover close to the frame. The beat staggers forward with anxious intent while Wolfshield’s delivery cuts through the murk like a plea and a provocation at once.
Underwater leans into a gorgeous vocal arrangement that calls up artists like Clannad and Chrystabell, bathing the song in a kind of submerged ache. “Lost Forever” slides further into trip-hop, hi-hats ticking over languid guitar and soft vocals.
The Dive changes the pulse with a stomping backbeat, early-90s house flavor, and yelp samples that nod toward EMF and Rob Base, while still keeping one foot in the mist.
Melt Away offers one of the record’s warmest invitations: “You know you think too much, you know you try too hard,” Wolfshield sings, before extending the line, “Come to the show and melt with me.”
Then Lights Out folds in Trébuchet’s San Antonio upbringing, with trip-hop and freestyle glowing beneath the song’s unease. The lyrics circle a figure seen in the dark, maybe memory, maybe paranoia, maybe the old lover who still lingers at the edge of sight. Whatever bound them together has burned through; what remains is residue, distance, and the quiet ruin of crossed lines.
By the time In The Wind closes on fierce breakbeats and eerie synths, with Portishead and Massive Attack again hanging in the air, The Canary has made its case: a graveyard bloom.
Listen to The Canary below and order the LP here.
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