If the good ship Post-Rock-Revival has already set sail into the pop-cultural
consciousness, then what more sweet a shore for it to dock at, at this
early stage of the all-over-again, than Chicago? Yet, the city that,
first time around, seemed to give the world naught but hot-chops instrumentalists
has, this go-round, birthed a much more blessed vessel: Volcano!, a ship
so nice they named her with an exclamation mark. And Volcano! honcho
Aaron With knows all about the exclamatory, having a haranguing vocal
styling that hangs somewhere between the unctuous syllable-eels of the
Thom Yorke human-being and the homo-a-go-go suicide-notes of Xiu Xiu
hysterioso Jamie Stewart. On the mic, With is wail and assail, viciousry
and verse, word and deed, the scream and the screech of the boy with
his heart on fire. This probably doesn't sound particularly post-rockin' — given
such a genre-stickering could be equated with boys-too-scared-to-sing — but,
then, well, With also plays the guitar like Ian T. Williams, the "down" moments
of Volcano!'s quiet/loud racketry finding With throwing this two-faced
frontman two-hander out like the two-hit combo; he spits out the Tourettic
tortured-vocalismo — like in "Red and White Bells," whose emotional
tolls cause With to ring out cries of "blood steeped like tea-leaves" and
needy needs and those titular beautiful seizures (such being matched
by the emo-twitchery of his singing throat) — whilst stuttering
just as much on the spattering, spastic guitar clatter and clang/Klang.
All this friction causes heat of almost magma agony; and such hot hot
guitar/vox duality speaks of the cleaved hemispheres of the Volcano!
racket, and how (get it on, get it on) the two become one, and how With
and his homies — dudes named Mark Cartwright and Sam Scranton — understand
the dynamics of dynamics. The pretty-croonery/gentle-harmonics and the
hellacious-screech/distortion-pedals, in this rock band, feel less like
some genre-mandated shift than like a bloodied battle, their contrasted
quiet/loud playing out, on the pantomimed stage of rock-'n'-roll, like
the eternal struggle between light and dark.
|
