This is a second album from Aaron With (guitar and vocals), Sam Scranton (drums, percussion) and Mark Cartwright (electronica and bass). I didn't come across the first, but it just jumped to the top of my list.
My first impressions of "Paperwork" were dismissive. Half listening while working on something else, all I could hear was contrived dissonance, adolescent shallowness and irritating pseudo randomness. I almost gave up on the idea of writing a review at all.
But stumbling., weeks later, into the video for the album's single release "Africa Just Wants To Have Fun" my conversion was instant. The video is close to unwatchable, (disturbingly psychotic and very funny) but the music was suddenly doing much stranger things than I had imagined, much more seditious and mind-changing things.
The general premise seems to be that eroticism, anger, confusion, desire, whimsy, personal politics, noise, improvisation, jazz and beauty can be layered artfully on top of each other, way beyond any normal limits of gravity or sense and then played and enacted simultaneously. The conclusion I draw from listening three times through the album, without stopping for sandwiches, is that such a process in the hands of very deft musicians with slightly warped attitudes can produce an entirely satisfactory listener experience.
VOLCANO! are experimental in the sense that they do plan some quite unreasonable things, and then do them to see what happens. Perhaps there are times when nothing of any consequence happens. If so, it doesn't matter at all because in the present case we have ten pieces of evidence that it can also work a treat. There is also a track listed as -------- which is half a minute long and acts as creaking portal between tracks 8 and 10. It also works well.
The deadpan juxtaposition of obscenity, sarcasm, musical slapstick, great tunes and super-artful playing and singing leaves me with only Frank Zappa as a reference point. Not that VOLCANO! are anything like FRANK ZAPPA, it's just that in calibrating your response (if you haven't already heard this CD) the best thing you could do might be to spin yourself inyo a ZAPPA frame of mind and shoot yourself 30 years into a harsher future than even Francis might have imagined (although he did describe the mp3 revolution fairly accurately in the early 80s).
At one level we have a demented, but rather beautiful falsetto voice, streaming consciousness in a crooning, non repeating melody and possibly in three four time. At the same time a creatively aggressive four four is being hammered on a very lively drum kit, a guitar is stuttering and there are phials of electronic sounds being thrown in through a window. It could be DON CABALLERO on a disorientation course with James Joyce offering auto-lyrics. But listen for twelve bars or so and the threes and fours join up for an exhilarating moment of near-sanity. And then a soulful guitar phrase holds on for dear life before the whole thing wheels off somewhere else. Nothing remains the same, nothing settles into comfort or predictability.
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As I listen I get the sense that the three of them are paying intense attention, that they are well into playing this stuff live and that they are grinning like sleep-deprived fighter pilots on Mission 324.
Each track has its outstanding qualities. "Slow Jam" is a string-laden European song of Scott Walker proportions, wrestled to the ground by a demented 32 year old in a bad cardigan, eyes bulging with an obsessive but undisclosed mission. It's sad, beautiful and hilarious all at once. It also has a great, euphoric guitar riff that drags the vocal, the drums and the bass with it when it appears.
"Africa Just Wants To Have Fun" is a brilliantly sustained stream of vitriol, squirted in the specific direction of the Bono / Geldoff axis of well-meaning. The word-torrent lyric sheet includes the magnificent "...I know the smell of your leather perfume, it smells like / Death to me, smells like piss on a fire, smells like toxic fumes at a maquiladora"
"Palimpsests" (Like "78 Oil Crisis") is a seven minute mini-album all on its own. As in those ancient manuscripts, the scriptures are laid one across each other until none can be heard with any certainty and strange new patterns emerge from the hyper-crowded mix.
Duff tracks? Well, no, Absolutely not. Just when an idea seems to be bedding itself into your brain, another three turn up to disrupt things. There must be bands who don't produce this much noise-diversity in a lifetime, never mind one album.
Some people will hate even the small amount of "Paperwork" they can bear to listen to but a few of them will find their minds changing later. Sharp ears will cherish one or two Buckley moments, No one will be surprised to learn that VOLCANO! are from Chicago.
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