The Fire Show
Above the Volcano of Flowers
[Perishable; 2002]
Rating: 8.1
There are certain bands that just seem destined to do great things. Whether
it's a band with a sound all their own, or just a boatload of ambition, you
can sense it in the air as their music travels through it. The Fire Show's
eponymous first album revealed them as a band full of ideas, and the necessary
swagger to carry them through to interesting ends. Released a year later, the
mini-album Above the Volcano of Flowers continues that forward-thinking
evolution. The Fire Show's sound is built on a basic enough template of
craftily penned post-punk anthems, but they're not afraid to deviate from that
formula by, say, running their own material through a meat grinder of samplers
and refashioning it as a close cousin of Warp-style IDM.
It's hard to know what to expect from the band when you first get your hands on
this record-- it's packaged in a very plain cardboard slipcase with no information
beyond the title, the label, and the band's website, where artwork and four extra
MP3s can be downloaded. You can't even find the song titles on the website--
they're all read on track eight by a voice that seems to be having some major
problems keeping itself aligned with the space/time continuum, constantly slowing
and speeding up, sometimes to the point of being unintelligible. But as annoying
as the liner notes are, the music manages to speak for itself quite nicely. The
band's pairing with producer Brian Deck, well-known for his junkyard-bound
kitchen sink production techniques, could hardly be more appropriate.
The disc opens as the Fire Show quietly approach you with some swelling, ambient
guitar and quietly mixed keyboard ostinatos, then a synth and cornet hook are
sunk deep into your eardrums. Elastic bass throbs and pulsates as vocalist M.
Resplendent intones, "My mind makes debts that my body can't repay/ My heart
keeps beating its head against the walls of this cage." Tense strings creep
along in the undertow as Olias Nil's guitar tears apart the song's wordless
second verse. Nil's guitar is just a quick punch in the head, though, and the
band then proceeds to rip through with the snorting, crunching middle eight.
"Designing a Steeper Cliff" is followed by the propulsive "Heart Muscle Mass,"
with a bass and drum groove worthy of any of the band's obvious forefathers
like Gang of Four or The Fall. Unfortunately, Resplendent's vocal limits also
come sharply into focus on this song, which finds him wailing like a deranged
Muppet on the song's refrain: "Our insurrection sprang from summer's call to
arms/ To arms!/ Heart muscle mass/ Continues to grow." Thankfully, this is
really the only place where he falters, mostly sticking to a scattershot,
declamatory delivery that befits his range quite well.
While processing and electronic flourishes have always been present
in the Fire Show's sound, the band has never taken it as far as they
do on "Black & White Trees Line the Paths of Sleep," an electronic
reconstitution of other music from the band's catalog, all of it
rendered unrecognizable by processing and sampling. Stuttering beats
and vintage synths eye each other warily as other sounds buzz in the
background, slowly piling texture onto the beats. The band are really
at their best when they stick to their brand of rhythmically charged,
experimental post-punk, but this is an interesting development in their
sound, and its more subtle implementation in the other songs reveals
the true promise of that direction.
The slow-motion post-punk of "You the Ghost" is awash in strategically
placed drones and programming, creeping along like a less tortured
Joy Division or Section 25. The acoustic guitar and cooing backup
vocal that suddenly enter to close out the song are about the last
thing you'd expect, but it sets up the piano intro of "Sonny Listman,
Dead Like Latin" beautifully. That song then launches into more of
the snaking post-punk that the band has basically perfected at this
point, replete with violently mixed guitar interjections and stuck-keyed
synths humming around the edges.
As the droning conclusion of "Sonny Listman" consumes itself with
rising guitar noise, "Bed with Ambulance Police Light on Top" rounds
the set out with a barrage of glitchy percussion, distorted vocals
and freakishly hollow-sounding bass that eventually lurch to a halt
like broken machinery. It's a fitting end to an adventurous release
for a band that was short-lived, but accomplished what they could when
they could. It's the sound of a band exploring their capabilities and
discovering that they don't have very many, and that's a great thing
to hear.
-Joe Tangari, May 24th, 2002