Canvas
No Love, No Hope, No Future

British hardcore band Canvas is a hard-hitting quintet without love and without hopes, no future they say that they have. The cover art is dark and looks kind of mellow. It is the debut album of this band, the darkest songs they have ever written – so they claim, but how many other songs have they written? This is after all their debut album so they couldn’t have too much other stuff out there. One thing I come to reflect about is the name of the band, Canvas, that sounds more like something grande, something imposing, something large with symphonic additions and choirs. Strange thing though is that the press sheet talks about DIY and all of those things, that don’t rhyme too well with the grand illusion I have about a band name like Canvas.

And Canvas isn’t particularly impressive in the grandeur department; their music is fairly typical hardcore music. The sound is heavy, powerful, the screams are agonising and the production is quite typical of the genre – the tempo is low all through the album. There isn’t too much in terms of variation, the songs are quite similar throughout the ten tracks and 33 minutes of music. I think it is not a big stretch to describe this as a fairly typical hardcore album; the originality of a band called Canvas should be bigger in my book. But then again, I am not reviewing the band’s choice of name; it is their music that matters.

This is not really a masterpiece in my book, not too inspiring. The vocals are pretty dull and the low tempo doesn’t really inspire me. The album lacks hit songs and it lacks a good focal point, I grow tired of listening to it very fast and the playing time, despite being only just short of the half hour mark, is too long and the thing I have felt most when listening to the album is how much of the time I was waiting for it to end.

Maybe something for the fans of the genre, but for me it is just another one of those dull albums I have to get through because I have already started the work on reviewing them. I doubt this is music that will appeal to others than fans of genre; it has a too narrow angle of approach for reaching any wider audience. Fans of this genre will most likely disagree with me but No Life, No Hope, No Future, No Purchase!

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