VOLCANO! - Piñata

We'd lost track of them after “Paperwork“, the album with which the Chicago trio sharpened the intriguing but still somewhat muddled art-rock of “Beautiful Seizure“, the record that had established them as one of the most interesting names on the American music scene.

Well, after four years spent between touring, writing and recording, Aaron Smith, Mark Cartwright and Sam Scranton are back on their feet with “Piñata”, a work that immediately stands out for its drive to sift through their repertoire in search of more markedly pop moods and solutions, continuing, in a sense, the process of condensation set in motion by the previous album. Even so, the band keeps conjugating a fundamentally irregular verb, made of sudden spasms, bumpy paths, insistent pulses that strive at all costs to puncture the instrumental dynamics. Crooked, oblique yet seductive, the world of Volcano! remains as colourful and muscular as ever (“Supply And Demand”), slippery and dazed (“So Many Lemons”, with a holy card of David Thomas tucked in its wallet) and, even though the electronic flourishes have been scaled back, the narrative framework still shows off its taste for the eccentric and the unusual.

You can hear a slightly tipsy, stretched-out Xtc (“Child Star”), passionate, aching serenades (“Platebreaker”), a Radiohead suspended in mid-air (“St. Mary Of Nazareth”), playful romps in wonderland that recall the early Architecture In Helsinki (“Long Gone”), not forgetting a bit of healthy hip-shaking, amid pulsing synths and escape routes through shimmering choruses (the title track). The emotional peak comes with “Fighter”, a synthesis of romantic turmoil and quiet despair that never spills over, content to vibrate below deck.

All in all, another work to be digested very slowly.

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15/06/2012