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Isn’t it odd how you sometimes takeaway a lasting impression of an album that has little to do with the reality? Last year, I reviewed the Cortical Tectonics disc from Canvas Solaris, and when I received their new, Atomized Dream, album, I put it in the CD player thinking that I was about to be treated to a heavy, technical assault. Instead, I was very surprised by the dreamy, almost meditative , The Binaural Beat, that seductively spun out of my speakers. Looking back at the review of the previous disc, I was struck by the fact that I noted the band’s softer side, as well as the fact that I only gave it a 5/10 rating.

A couple things have changed over the past year for Canvas Solaris, most notably the expansion of the franchise from the basic trio to today’s quintet formation. The addition of a keyboardist has made the most readily apparent impact, adding context to the band’s complexities, imparting shades and tones where previously, cold hard math rock might have ruled. There are times where a band like Spiral Architect is still the best comparison. But Atomized Dream is a vast improvement, in terms of being an album having cohesion and replay ability, over Cortical Tectonics.

The heavier, technical material still exists, to be sure, as witnessed by the precise guitar work on, Patterns Spiral Into Swarm. But they’re leavened by additional layers and textures, to the point that track sounds more like some latter day Fates Warning material. Tracks like, Heat Distortion Manifest, and Solar Droid, offer fans of the unadulterated heavier stuff a fix of what they crave. But the true gold on this album comes in the form of tracks like the 10 minute album closer, The Unknowable and Defeating Glow, which builds, ebbs and flows, and is marked by a fantastically nuanced beauty. Canvas Solaris didn’t have a track like this in their arsenal last time around, and they’re a much more interesting band for it. The addition of the new blood has allowed the band to explore their musical psyches more thoroughly, and to find melodies that may have been previously been hidden away within their “complex for complexity’s sake” music. The softer moments are more compelling this time around, the heavier ones just as technically and aurally challenging, with the balance leading to Atomized Dream standing heads and shoulders above their previous effort.