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Volcano the Bear
Five Hundred Boy Piano
United Dairies Records.
Is it just me or are the Volcano the Bear boys beginning to make some semblage of sense these days. In fact change that to, becoming more playful. It could however be due a saturation of a high intake of e numbers in my dietary intake that is making my head mushy causing a sludging of my thought process’ to make what was once very illogical become highly logical. Does that make sense?
I won’t bother waiting for an answer to that as I assume the answer is a resounding no. But then we are here to review a number of releases by, let’s face it now, the most eccentric band in the U.K. or the world for that matter. Volcano the Bear you get the impression are toying with us, their output has always confounded. Their branded mix of oddly constructed psychedelia has often bordered on the absurd, to approach their releases is to do so with an open mind fore armed with the knowledge that you’ll never view music in the same way again. To think that they breathe the same air is equally shocking / enlightening (delete as best suits).
I was first exposed to the Volcano sound via their Pickled Egg album ‘Yak folks r’us’. Now having done the whole Residents thing in my formative years, I still wasn’t prepared for what I was about to hear. In all honesty one of the most unsettling works I’ve ever sat in the presence of, in fact not since Crass’ ‘Nagasaki Nightmare’ had I sat through a release that equally scared, enthralled, shocked, leaving me with a sense of unanswered answers with which to pursue questions for.
Let’s get this straight from the start, ‘Five Hundred Boy Piano’ is still awkwardly indigestible, not as wholesomely scary as previous adventures, in fact on this six movement display there is a deep sense of organised chaos that comes to fruition. Deliberate or accidental you decide.
VTB may not be your common garden S Club 7 wannabe’s, but there is at play an unworldly texture to their ambition. Their style is borne of fragments as wide ranging as art rock encompassing the demented elements of Henry Cow: a restoration of avant gardism, like an unhinged Residents and a very real sense of eccentric English psychedelia that surpasses the acid madcap shrills of it’s greatest usurper, Syd Barret.
Beneath the oddball direction, VTB instil an almost comic element to ‘500 Boy Piano’ that almost hints at a darkened abstract Monty Python at work. ‘Hairy Queen’ opens the set, likening the sound to Viv Stanshall in full flight amid a scene from the Wicker Man, casually unorthodox and medieval in texture. ‘Seeker’ begins with an eerie drone ambient style melody that could easily befit the Oggum label, before engaging in a dizzying mix of meditational blasts, see saw manipulations, ravaged improvised jazz segments, twisted Eastern flavours and sea shanty delights. ‘The tallest people in the world’ is a triptych of sorts, ‘Being’ which makes up the first segment with it’s fluid sounds and chilling druid like chanting makes for disconcerting listening while ‘Peanut puppet’ could almost act as a soundtrack for some obscure cartoon from Poland. Throughout ‘tic / toc’ your made to feel you are presiding over some kind of ritualistic ceremony overseen by Stockhausen.
Scorching and frantically dissected half chords, uneven rhythms and an abuse of goofiness manifest itself within the title track, their ability to flitter from any suggested style to the next at such unexpected pace recalling mechanics applied by the Japanese futuro-electro-techno crew. ‘I am the mould’ probably offers the most stimulation in as far as the accepted notion of music goes, slowly dragging in texture, given a mystical charm by the use of Middle Eastern themes and some wide-screen style piano segments, quite soothing if truth be told.
Hard to live with, but even harder to live without.
MARK BARTON
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