The cover of Canyon's latest, Canyon: Live in NYC, features a desert fire burning slow and austere, billowing smoke into the dry evening air. It is a perfect metaphor for the band's music, which always feels elemental, yet also seers with a sense of purpose and otherworldly grace. As on their two studio albums, 2002's Empty Rooms and their eponymous 2001 debut, the band conjures up a lush, ethereal soundtrack to love, loss, and all else that is either stinging or sweet. To hear the band's live reworking of the Rolling Stones’ "Playing With Fire," which is here metered down to a hypnotic slow burn, is to truly understand why, in this life, one indeed better watch their step. The band knows that, like the deep and gorgeous chasm of their namesake, anything truly sublime is treacherous as well. As such, this live recording is characteristically elegant without ever becoming too comfortable. Songs from the band's back catalogue are here injected with a sense of sumptuous urgency, as if it were the last time they will be played before disappearing into the abyss.

Much has been made of the musical pedigree of founding members Brandon Butler (vocals, lap steel, harmonica) and Joe Winkle (guitars, harmonium, lap steel), who once served with emo forerunners Boy's Life. Initially, it is difficult to imagine Canyon's aesthetic farther removed from that band's storied guitar violence. Yet, as one allows the music of Canyon to fully manifest, it is evident that this seething intensity still very much exists, only in a different form. Anchored by Evan Berodt on bass, Dave Bryson on drums, and Derrick DeBorja on organ and accordion, Canyon's music is delicately underpinned by atmospherics that are nearly as volatile as they are beautiful. That the band seldom trades in on this threat of pyrotechnics is a testament to maturity rather than complacency. Experience has taught them that things unsaid often speak loudest, that the bite without the bark sometimes stings the most.