Description
Doppel-CD im Digipak
neue Pressung
Volcano the Bear's dramatic, highly ambitious two disc (two-CD or two-LP)
return is a lot to ingest, however, every second is rewarding in what could
easily be one of my top albums of the year so far and my favorite Volcano the
Bear release to date.
Jon Whitney, brainwashed.com
Label-Info Beta-lactam Ring Records:
VTB have crafted a strange geometry
in their musique concrete between celestial duck honks and what sounds like a
flood in the living room, there are more than a few occasions of heads cocked at
the speaker in mundus caninus. Of course, this bodes well for humans, too.
Augmented by all the dog friendly moments is a double album of sprawling musical
invention. Record one births gently into a lo-fi-adelic Comus-like saline that
even might even win over the Devendra crowd, if the Devendra crowd had ingested
just a little too much mushroom tea on that day and left their ironic trucker
hats at the door. Song becomes fever dream and then pitches into a barren place
of low estate and low chanting whose Residents might well be Eskimos. With
typical minimalist pageantry, VTB mutate from piece to piece, punctuating along
the way with surprise sounds that the aforementioned dogs love so well; the
kinds of quirks that make Nurse With Wound and P16.D4 records such fun listens.
VTB spin some very melodious tales, which are subliminally hooky, after a
fashion. Spiritual and surreal are sisters. Quiet ritualism queues with
dadaistic and with progressive harmonies, together on the same fractured, out
world, sing-along journey. And that's just record one. Record two crawls slowly
from the echoey ooze, grows legs and then presents as a different and, in many
ways, more dramatic creature. A long, shifting organ drone becomes a deeply
psychedelic statement that bleats loud and strong like an acid bleached Spiral
Insana or a sneaky This Heat.


