The Volcanics - So Cold

Mon 29th Jan, 2007 in Music Reviews

There’s nothing revolutionary about The Volcanics. But at the same time, this band sticks firmly to all the rules written by the bands you’d think of as ‘revolutionary’. Iggy, The Stones, the Ramones - just 10 seconds listening to The Volcanics is enough to give you the idea.

So Cold, the four-piece’s new release, is ballsy, gritty, dirty and all the other words you’d use to describe a band most at home in a dingy, sweaty bar with sticky floors and the suss-looking doorman who makes the routine ID check a terrifying experience.

The title track is business as usual for John Phatouros (vocals), Mick Whitby (guitar), Jason Cleary (bass) and Warren Hall (drums). It’s a three-minute brew of all the best bits of the bands that invented rock & roll as we know it. The riff. The breakdown. Those irresistable baby-baby-baby harmonies. The steady build-up from rock-by-numbers to mess any mayhem with barely a pause.

The inclusion of two live tracks (Wreck Myself, Snuff) confirm what we knew before the first chorus of So Cold: that The Volcanics are a live band more than anything else. The holy grail for all bands of this persuasion is to condense what all five senses take in at a live show into just the one. While some come closer than others, few producers will ever pull it off. For anybody who has seen The Volcanics, Wreck Myself and Snuff serve as reminders that a Volcanics gig will always be better than a Volcanics record. For anyone who hasn’t, God help them.