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Riding the canyon

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Who are Rid­ers of the Canyon? Of the four band mem­bers, Joana Ser­rat needs least in­tro­duc­tion. The folk singer from Vic has proved her tal­ent and per­se­ver­ance for over a decade and has made a name for her­self in the world of music with such al­bums as Hard­core from the Heart, which was re­leased in Eng­lish and Cata­lan in 2021 and which re­ceived high praise from the British music media.

Roger Usart, from Man­lleu, was a mem­ber of the group La Fel­la­tio de Cu­pido in the nineties, which a young Ser­rat greatly ad­mired. Usart has not only made such no­table records as Llamp de bosc, but has also em­barked on such crazy and am­bi­tious pro­jects as col­lect­ing as much ev­i­dence as pos­si­ble about the ex­is­tence of Big­foot, the hairy human-like myth­i­cal crea­ture pur­ported to in­habit forests in North Amer­ica. He is cur­rently prepar­ing The Sasquatch Lair, a book doc­u­ment­ing con­ver­sa­tions with dif­fer­ent ex­perts.

Matthew Mc­Daid is orig­i­nally from Belfast, but as a child he set­tled in Rupit, from where he de­vel­oped a folk style with a cer­tain melan­cholic af­ter­taste. A few years ago that con­vinced Ser­rat (and her part­ner David Giménez) to sign him to her record label, Great Canyon.

Mean­while, Víctor Par­tido is from Sant Boi de Llo­bre­gat and the only mem­ber of the quar­tet who is not from Osona county. As well as man­ag­ing Aclam Records, for the past three years he has been the di­rec­tor of the iconic Al­taveu music fes­ti­val in his home town.

The com­ing to­gether of this four has re­sulted in an epony­mous album that shows that Cat­alo­nia can pro­duce good music with deep Amer­i­can roots. With great Eng­lish pro­nun­ci­a­tion and pho­net­ics, the album is in part the prod­uct of many hours of lis­ten­ing to (ex­cel­lent) music and also comes out of a feel­ing of fra­ter­nity and team­work that the band mem­bers have man­aged to cre­ate.

Recorded in stu­dios in Barcelona, Girona, Texas, Nashville, Ore­gon and Lon­don, the 10-track album kicks off with Mas­ter of My Lonely Time, with its pow­er­ful mix of elec­tric sounds, and con­tin­ues with pas­toral vocal har­monies (on Here in My Dreams, for ex­am­ple) in a bal­ance of moder­nity and tra­di­tion. The pro­duc­tion of the first part re­calls Ser­rat’s last works, while the sec­ond half is a for­mula that comes close to the Amer­i­can music of the sev­en­ties. “It’s sub­lime, a won­der­ful album,” wrote the re­spected music critic Allan Jones a few weeks ago in the British mag­a­zine, Uncut.

As with all Ser­rat’s records, the album fea­tures per­for­mances by guest mu­si­cians, such as BJ Cole (Elton John, R.E.M.), Cory Gray (The De­lines, The De­cem­berists), and Grammy win­ners Jesse Chan­dler (Mid­lake, Mer­cury Rev) and McKen­zie Smith (St. Vin­cent, Sharon Van Etten, First Aid Kit).

Let’s hope is they never tire of rid­ing the canyon…

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