volcano! - Paperwork

2005’s Beautiful Seizure, the first release from Chicago noise rock three-piece volcano! caught the attention of critics, who were impressed by the versatile vocals of Adam With set against the sonic pastiche of thunderous drums, distorted guitar riffs, and electronic glitches. Volcano! bring more of the same in their new album Paperwork.

Musically, volcano! is pretty similar to noise rock groups Parts & Labor, Gang Gang Dance, and No Age. But there is a lot to this band that in certain ways sets them apart. Perhaps the most impressive thing about Paperwork is the vocal acrobatic performance by With. Going effortlessly from a growl to a croon to a falsetto and back again at a breakneck pace, With at times sounds like a sort of noise rock Tim Buckley in that he uses voice as another instrument. While that may seem like high praise for a relatively unknown, unproven singer from a noise rock band, one listen to the opening track, “Performance Evaluation Shuffle,” confirms that With is one exciting vocalist.

And just because volcano! use voice as an instrument doesn’t mean that the lyrics are neglected; on Paperwork, they are both bitingly satirical and cleverly quirky. The real stand-out cut here is “Africa Just Wants to Have Fun,” a savage indictment of the phony philanthropy of Bono: “You just came to shoot your load off the stage/A pacifier for a nation of beige/After your concert and at the G-8/You came to party yeah you came to get laid.”

That’s not to say Paperwork is a flawless album. Volcano! seem to fall into the almost inevitable noise rock trap of having the raucous noise becoming exhausting. When a band never lets the listener catch his breath with a little bit of a lull in the action before hitting them upside the head with a blast of noise, an album gets pretty old pretty quickly. While none of the tracks on Paperwork are terrible, it’s harder to appreciate them one after another when each prior song wears the listener down like they do. By the time the listener gets to “’78 Oil Crisis,” a great song that has a fantastic buildup over the course of two minutes, most people will have already hit the “noise rock wall” where the constant noise just seems like noise for noise’s sake, and not in the Merzbow good way.

Overall, volcano! get a lot right. Given the current state of indie rock, with artists foregoing much rocking with any kind of sincerity in favor of pseudo-intellectual sensitive-guy pretentiousness, a rock band with a bullshit detector so firmly stuck in the “ON” position is a refreshing change.

Video for volcano!'s song "Africa Just Wants to Have Fun"

MP3:
volcano! - Africa Just Wants to Have Fun
volcano! - Slow Jam 1

For streaming tracks from Paperwork and Beautiful Seizure, as well as photos, videos, lyrics, and other information, check out the volcano! website