volcano!

Without wishing to dwell too much on the past, let’s start with a confession. While 2005’s Beautiful Seizure may have received several critical platitudes at the time, not to mention a coveted 10/10 review here on this very site; to these ears it represented one of the most unlistenable, pretentious pieces of guff imaginable. Fast-forward three years, however, and it's clear that volcano! have added “tune” to their list of undoubted musical talents.

In the flesh they’re still something of an enigma, possibly due to a bout of stage fright which hampers this evenings opening couplet ‘Sweet Tooth’ and ‘Performance Evolution Shuffle’. Vocalist Aaron With struggles to make himself heard at first, and at times its all down to the remarkable drumming skills of Sam Scranton to lift their set out of the ordinary and into another realm, which he achieves with some aplomb.

By the time ‘Fairy Tale’ and old favourite ‘Apple Or A Gun’ close proceedings, the Chicago trio are all smiles, switching between the former’s skewered jazz funk meanderings to the latter’s incessant stop-start song within a song dynamic, thus ensuring a triumphant finale that threatened to end in adversity some thirty minutes previous.

In Photos by Toby Price