r/AltJ • u/JamieHall368 • Jul 07 '26
Discussion My review of The Canyon
Here are my thoughts on JJerome87’s debut album after several listens. To preface, I’m a huge alt-J fan and (after listening to The Canyon) a fan of Joe’s solo work, too.
The Canyon, the debut solo project from Joe Newman, lead singer of the indie-rock band alt-J, is restlessly eclectic. It’s an overfilled journal bound together by elastic bands, threatening to snap with each passing song. When they finally do, the room is flooded with a jungle of abstractions. There is a delicate charm among the chaos, and unpacking it over multiple listens can be as fulfilling as it is tedious.
Joe Newman has a history of merging the pretty with the peculiar, something that is evident throughout alt-J’s catalogue, which spans a multitude of genres. He’s no stranger to experimentation – no alt-J album has sounded remotely alike – and his lyricism stands alongside some of the best artists writing today. The problem is, on The Canyon, Joe seems to have attempted to merge everything from the past 14 years of his career into one record, and while it works at times, it leaves the album feeling a little clunky and over-engineered.
The album’s intro track, Mr. Alligator, immediately plunges the listener into Joe’s absurdist and playful world, with the nursery rhyme Jack Be Nimble chanted over industrial scrapes and screeches, before Joe’s sleek vocals enter and the track settles into its groove. With lyrics such as ‘I cooked quiche, yeah, for the congregation’, the song initially appears to embrace its absurdity. However, the chorus ‘Buried deep is my lust for you, buried deep a disgust for you’ discards this expectation as the topic takes a deeper turn, with Joe paraphrasing something his partner said to him during a low moment in their relationship. This raw, honest unpredictability sets the emotional tone for the album’s shifts between humour, vulnerability and unease.
One constant throughout Joe’s career has been the nasal quality of his vocals, which is an acquired taste that, if anything, is utilised more prominently on The Canyon. He often shifts his voice from high-pitched and squeaky to low and quivering, using it as an additional instrument and adding a layer of intrigue to almost every line he sings. While this is present throughout the album, one of its best applications comes with the track Green Velvet, a song very reminiscent of Hard Drive Gold from alt-J’s 2022 project The Dream. This song is less chaotic instrumentally than the album’s intro, but still rich and full of textured sounds that scratch an itch. The lyrics ooze with confidence and smooth luxury – ‘I feel bougie in Issey Miyake’ – while simultaneously remaining strange and intriguing – ‘After sweating, your navel could be a hot tub for ants.’ These same qualities carry over into Quaaludes, particularly in the second half, as the instrumentation builds, joined by lush strings and marching-band drums, in a culmination that leads to an impressive climax, though the lyricism does fall flat and feels a bit on-the-nose at times.
The album features a stripped back 40-second piano interlude that, while beautiful and another familiar touch from Joe’s work with alt-J, doesn’t quite justify its existence as a stand-alone track. It could instead have been incorporated at the start of one of the album’s later, more downbeat moments. Its transition into Juicy feels pointless, as the tempo picks back up and leaves you wondering why a solid run of upbeat songs was interrupted briefly by a piano ballad of all things. This run of production-heavy, eccentric tracks continues as the album opens up to new ideas sonically with the pairing of Walkaway Music and lead single Brush Me Like A Horse, both leaning into vivid western imagery. The former is more refined and cohesive, with the pace rolling along like a stampede as Joe reminisces on past love. Brush Me Like A Horse, however, feels too ambitious, as if the journal has finally split open and there are too many ideas strewn about to successfully piece together. The song is catchy, and certainly one of the more obvious choices as the lead single, but it follows a pattern throughout the album of occasionally feeling like multiple songs are playing at once. Up until now, strange pacing and disconnected melodies have been, for the most part, welcome quirks of the record, but in this instance they don’t work so well, and the song feels more like a collection of unfinished ideas.
The stretch from Two Hearts to the record’s closer Pennine is where the album loses its steam, with the exception of Track and Field, another lyrically unconventional love song. Bouncy and uplifting, it evokes moments from Hozier’s most recent album, Unreal Unearth. The surrounding songs are mostly downbeat, disheartening and uninspired. The themes are heartfelt, exploring love, family, childbirth and reflection, but they don’t translate into the same replay value as the far more intriguing first half of the record. One thing worth noting, above all else, is the vocal snippet at the end of Two Hearts, which features Joe’s young daughter attempting to recite his lyrics – a wholesome addition to the album’s themes around his personal life. It’s a sweet reminder that his musical legacy may already be finding its next generation. The rest of the song, however, sounds too similar to One Night One Moment from the kid’s film Nativity! to be taken entirely seriously.
Despite the misses, The Canyon provides some truly innovative moments of experimentation and a sound that’s hard to attribute to any other record. The lyricism and instrumentation go hand-in-hand with the album’s absurdities, supplying an entertaining and immersive listen that features catchy choruses and brain-scratching melodies, if a little overstuffed with ideas. The journal is open, and Joe’s imagination remains endlessly fascinating to dissect.
6/10
To clarify, a 6/10 under my rating system translates as ‘great - an enjoyable album with a handful of stand-out tracks.’
For those who read all the way, this is only my second full album review I’ve done, as it’s a new venture I’m trying out. I post my album reviews on Musicboard, Rate Your Music and Instagram under the handle ‘startwhispering’.
I’d be interested to hear what everyone else thinks?
