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.
