There are two reasons why I wanted to write something about American band volcano! here:
[1] my blog is named after (a pluralized form of) their debut record.
[2] they are (relatively) obscure, perhaps because they are not immediately accessible, but they are well worth the effort of repeated listening.
A second's pondering suggests a myriad of possible metaphorical and symbolical meanings a piñata could stand for. Nevertheless, while the piñata has a rich and pluriformal history, I would say that its current cultural significance does not stretch far beyond a superficial one, a world of parties and candy, of unworriedness and good times. volcano! wanted to make a more danceable, and more easily approachable record, and they succeeded.
That is not to say that this is a pop record. These terms are always relative, and volcano! was always hard-to-get, to the point of extreme frustration, mostly because they were so unneccesarily so. They seemed to be searching for the right formula, striking noise pop gold the one moment and then - deliberately - diving back into unmelodic dissonance. Beautiful Seizure was an appropriate title, therefore, because they did it with uncanny grace, failing in a beautiful manner. It reminds me of André Breton's final statement in Nadja that "beauty will be convulsive, or it will not be at all". Their sophomore album title Paperwork suggested a more theoretical and calculated approach to their craft, and while somewhat more coherent, still faltered from time to time. It still took the menacing and challenging of their listeners a tad too far. But, in hindsight, when they sang of "poking holes in balloon animals" in Slow Jam, perhaps they were then already thinking of piñatas.
As such, there was always enormous potential in this band, and with Piñata it bursts out with all the colors that its artwork suggests. Not that the claims of danceability will soon be embraced by the large clubbing populace, but there should definitely be quite a considerable leftfield crowd susceptible to this. Especially the first two songs are the most bouncy and fun of their repertoire so far. The penultimate choice Supply and Demand has the same appeal, in its straightforward repeating of its title, with vocalist Aaron With as always bending the words in all possible shapes. He does the same in the chorus of Child Star and its really hard not to be reminded by the finale of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's eponymous debut, where the same words are obsessively repeated by a singer who is at least as weird and offbeat as Aaron. Both stretch the phonemes to their absolute physical and logical extremes. The album closer confirms the trend of the bookended tracks here being the most readily likable: its a circus of quickfire melodic riffs and beats, a rollercoaster of "long gone, gone long". Again, obsessively as always, its played out as far as possible, with every noisy crescendo circling back into its long gone, gone long.
But perhaps the most poignant moment here is when they slow it down on Fighter, the drums are slow and in control for once, while With proclaims that he is a fighter, and wants to turn his hands into knives. This slower, less frenzied version of their sound works wonderfully well, and it makes me wonder what would happen if they'd focus on it more. I believe they could go the same way as Wild Beasts, who have chosen to contain their eccentricities within an ever-tightening set of constraints, applying more abstraction with every record they put out.
Of course there is an equally legible case to make for the kaleidoscopic craziness and fun that is Piñata - and has always been volcano! They seem like a band that, whatever they do next, will always at the very least be interesting.
