- Label: 'The Leaf Label'
- Genre: 'Rock'
- Release Date: '4 June 2012'- Catalogue No: 'BAY 81CD, BAY 81VX, BAY 81V, BAY 81E'
Our Rating:
It's four years since I enthused about VOLCANO!'s "Paperwork" album. That was raw and reckless. It was inventive and seditious. It took me several listens to tune into its genius. By the end I was a convert.
So I was ready for PIÑATA. A piñata is a Mexican papier-mâché party box, possibly a Chinese idea. It is made to be filled with sweets, coins and trinkets and these spill out when the brightly painted container is smashed open by excited party-goers. (see the surreal video below). The name is spot on. I smashed mine open and jumped around for several days in spasms of what only VOLCANO! front man Aaron With could call "dancing".
PIÑATA has more lustre and melody than "Paperwork". It's not a shift equivalent to Captain Beefheart's "Clear Spot", but it is couple of shades mellower than "Trout Mask Replica". There are some sweet chord shifts and some singable melodies among all the other baubles, shocks and surprises. The densely-packed instrumental playing is rich. To the base elements of Aaron With's guitar and Sam Scranton's drums there are some exciting synth and other parts conjured in by Mark Cartwright, like the deliciously rasping bass stomp/squelch that makes an early appearance on track one ("Piñata") with a cracked bell sound and all kinds of added chords. The whole album sounds free and wayward but I get a sense of a lot of obsessive tweaking and reworking having gone down over the four year gap.
Lyrically, it flounces around with every kind of fantasy, banality and straight-faced weirdness. The mysterious trinket box at the grown-up children's party is a metaphor that works well in every sense. Children's weirdness is often the most serious and most truthful kind of expression. VOLCANO! get close to that. There's stuff like: "I wanna give something back to the community", "blinded, the bats begin to see", "I wanna go back in time. / Start over as a baby again", "a musical prodigy and a fencing champion!" are the sorts of arresting lines that leap out from the yowling and crooning (but deadly serious) madness.
Aaron With seems to sing with his arms spread wide and his head thrown back, making it all up with his eyes closed as he goes along. The precision of the drumming and the impossible bass lines tell another story. Whenever he chooses, he can make the voice rich and strong.
Apart from the wonderful title track "Child Star Regression", "Platebreaker" and "Fighter" stand out. "Fighter" is a loose-limbed decadent luxury item. It has a proper tune, performed in a gloriously indecent way. I imagine it as WILD BEASTS having a breakdown. "I'm a fighter" he sings, from the tail-end of a string defeats, with blood on his nose, going for one last crazy guitar solo that gets slowly buried by the bass and drums as it staggers to the end in terminal delirium. There's a nice reverbed gumbo feel to it that works a treat.
"Long Gone" has a super-wonky guitar solo. It's like some kind of old field holler, blues song or children's' street chant. That stomping squelching bass noise makes a showing. "Wandering around in the multiplex with a silly t shirt on" he sings, purposefully.
I just love recordings that give me reason to keep going back. Eight times so far? It's intense and rewarding. It's joyous and delightful. It judders and jerks and spins around. It's really funky too. I look at the archived gig list on the band's website and wonder how the hell I managed to miss them three times when they played at venues I love, just down the road from where I used to live. Madness.
