Volcano!–Paperwork
Somehow I missed this band on their first release, Beautiful Seizure, but on the strength of this sophomore effort I’m completely on the Volcano! bandwagon. Paperwork is not an easy album to digest, especially if you simply let it play in the background. Don’t do that: it demands your full attention. So much is going on in most of these songs that they must have been written with flow charts. Unusual beats and time signatures merge into one another, and the melodies–sometimes several different melodies per song–clash into each other and angle off into new directions. Noisy, yes, but not noise. These guys are tight and everything is woven together very carefully. Can you say Radiohead meets Don Caballero? I didn’t think so. But if you could, you might say “Volcano!”