Volcano!

Listening to volcano! is a journey through highs and lows, through confusion and clarity. Like much of their work, ‘Apple Or A Gun’ (the first single from their groundbreaking debut album Beautiful Seizure), refuses to be pigeonholed, or indeed easily comprehended on first listen. But it will repay your attention a hundredfold. With dramatic stylistic shifts and a typically ambitious arrangement, the song veers from delicate to possessed in the blink of an eye. Lucid but anarchic, never allowing the listener a moment to relax. Yet despite the apparent chaos, melody is never sacrificed. The single is backed with a recording of a live favourite that will only ever appear on this release: ‘I’ve Been Loving You Since Desert Storm’.

The lead single from volcano!’s second album, Paperwork, 'Africa Just Wants To Have Fun' demonstrates a more playful, immediate side to the band, while clinging to the unpredictability and originality that defines their sound. The song is a razor-sharp satire of certain rock stars who purport to save the world with dubious, self-serving rhetoric. Backed by Mark Cartwright (bass, electronics) and Sam Scranton (percussion), vocalist Aaron With’s lyric is a searing indictment of the misguided philanthropic attitude of participants in everything from Band Aid to the [Red] campaign, ending with the candid admission “I don’t know what to do / But I know what not to do”.

Beautiful Seizure is the debut album from Chicago trio volcano!, and it’s an intense, exhilarating and immensely rewarding ride. What may at first sound chaotic and unplanned reveals itself on repeated listening as meticulously structured: rhythms gather, flicker, melt (down) and emerge as something different; splenetic episodes give way to passages of hymnal calm which in turn are shattered as language breaks down into strobe-like stuttering and is tugged back into line by Sam Scranton’s insistent drumming; silvery shards of controlled static ride high above everything. Melodies are stretched to and beyond breaking point, Aaron With’s guitar shifts between a ragged, feverish dissonance and bright spaciousness. There are no boundaries and no indulgences, nothing here that’s hackneyed or extraneous.

Volcano!: Pinata (Black) [Vinyl LP + CD]

Volcano!: Pinata (Clear) [Vinyl LP + CD]

The Chicago trio’s outstanding third album, Piñata is the sound of volcano! past distilled into a most potent formula for the present: unsparingly concise, stickily melodic, lyrically stronger and stranger, darkly humorous, ferociously driven, fabulously inventive. Clocking in at just over 40 minutes, the album has an aggressive energy that’s as exciting as it is unpredictable.