Edith Bunker’s Demonized Vomit Insurance? Was there ever a better name for a band than that? I doubt it. Well maybe Chlamydia Hot Pants but more of them if and when their first single ever gets released.
Anyway, as you might imagine given the name, “Volume One” isn’t an album of three minute pop songs or even an album of songs for that matter. Whilst apparently the work of a man without a straitjacket called Brent Field, it would be better be regarded as a collection of sonic poems composed without thesaurus or any apparent attempt to entertain. To his credit there is also a lack of art house pretension in his deliberately oblique and often disconnected soundscapes as if he regarded himself as the anti-Christ to the abundant laptop loopers and samplers hiding in the land of indifference. The end result, whilst hardly inspirational, does prove to be hypnotic in much the same way as car crashes are. I could not tear my ears away from the creepily atonal rant that is “There Is A Land”, for example.
So, blood on the walls time. This album features some of the greatest song titles ever (“Shooby Taylor’s Grandma Smoking Crack”, “The Hand That Feeds Me Is Made of Dogshit” and “Aida, Ebola Crack and Guns”) but not one real song. Even in my most Buckfast induced avant-garde moments, I could not even attempt to sing along with any of these melody free sonic interludes but that is perhaps the plan for, in madness, there is reality even if that reality is not actual reality or any reality that you would want to be a part of.
“Volume One” is available as a limited edition of 100 copies on black vinyl so, at the very least, buying a copy could be regarded as an investment (of sorts).