Canyon Rose Outfit on the road

Canyon Rose - Justin Perkins and Christan Maslyk

By Stephen Dafoe

Morinville – A well-known local band has taken to the road for a five-day tour in British Columbia. The Canyon Rose Outfit, made up of Christan Maslyk (guitars and volcals), Justin Perkins (guitar), Matt Harrison (bass and vocals), Jesse Gauthier (drums), and Alex Pelletier-(trumpet), left Tuesday night to perform five shows in five days in Kelowna, Surrey and Vancouver before returning to Alberta for six more shows this month, including opening gigs for Nazareth and Colin Close.

“We wanted to do it last year but we just didn’t have enough stuff together and it wasn’t going to be worth it for us,” said Canyon Rose Outfit frontman Christan Maslyk, adding last summer saw the band doing only two shows in BC. “We are wanting to start to build some connections in BC so when we go back there again people remember or we can hook up with bands we’ve played with. We’re just trying to build our audience next door.”

998833_10151714274163914_248603889_nWhile Canyon Rose builds an audience in a neighbouring province, they will also be building some road experience with a number of new songs, music the band has been working on for their next album.

“It will be released in the fall, but we are using it [the tour] as an opportunity to play a lot of the stuff live,” Maslyk said, adding the new tunes are a little different sound than the band’s previous work. “They’re a lot less one genre – less country for sure. Our EP leaned a lot towards country. This one is kind of more groove based. There are a lot of new songs and more experimental guitar layers. We had a lot of fun with different guitar layers, overdubs and using interesting sounds that you don’t usually use. I think it represents us better.”

One of the things the band has been working into some of their live shows is some double drumming, using two drum kits to increase the level and layers of percussion. “We’re trying to do it as much as we can when the stage can accommodate us,” Maslyk said. “We’ve done two drum kits a couple times now. We can’t do it on every stage, but we’re trying to slowly incorporate some more of that into our live show.”

Not only has the band expanded its musical gear, Canyon Rose has recently purchased some of their own lights, allowing them to have some consistency in lighting effects at each of their shows.

On their return to Alberta, Canyon Rose will be under the lights at the Century Casino in Edmonton where they will be opening for Canadian rock legends Nazarath. The band is looking forward to it.

“Those are always good gigs when you can play a big venue and you do not have to worry about bringing the huge crowd when you are playing with someone like Nazarath,” Maslyk said, adding he is expecting a big crowd for the July 25 show. “It’s always fun for us to play on bigger stages like that and to play with a pretty recognizable Canadian act like that.”

Print Friendly, PDF & Email