Volcano Suns erupt again via Merge reissues

Posted by John Kenyon

When I was 16, I was part of a mission trip to Los Angeles, one of a dozen lily-white Iowa kids headed to the big city to lend a hand. I can’t honestly say I recall a single thing we did in a mission sort of way, but I can tell you that we visited several record shops. It was like the gates of music heaven had been opened and I had sprouted wings. I carried with me at all times a list of records that I had read about but never seen that I hoped to buy. At the top of the list was Volcano Suns’ All Night Lotus Party. I’m not sure where I heard about it — my guess is Rolling Stone, which was about the only music magazine I read back in those days — but I was convinced I needed to hear it.

I found it in the first store we visited — on vinyl, of course — and guarded it closely throughout the rest of the trip and the flight home. When I put the needle in the groove, the first thing that I heard was a blast of feedback, followed closely by a jackhammer guitar line that made me fear I’d somehow failed to notice the review’s mention that this was a hardcore band. Then the drum beat kicked in, a nicely paced 4/4 that cut the song’s pace by a quarter, and Peter Prescott began to sing: “I’m a collector of stuff that most folks ignore, you know that one man’s ceiling is another man’s floor.” I was hooked.

I didn’t know that Prescott had been the drummer in Mission of Burma. I hadn’t even heard of Mission of Burma. I didn’t know there was a previous Volcano Suns album. I just knew I loved this album, which was about as far from what I was hearing on the radio in Des Moines as I could imagine.

Not until I got to college a couple of years later did I find a similar vista of great music, allowing me to go back and grab the band’s debut, The Bright Orange Years, and then keep up through Bumper Crop, Farced and the rest.

I wore these albums out — the first three, anyway — hoping one day to see them on CD. Now, 20 years later (!) Merge Records has answered the call, reissuing those first two albums on CD (their first time in the format) with remastering and bonus tracks. For the first time in 20 years, I can hear “White Elephant” without the tiny skip that I’ve heard so many times that I expect it no matter how many times I spin my pristine digital copy.

Most critics prefer the debut, though I’ll always lean toward All Night Lotus Party, if for no other reason than that I’m intimately familiar with its every note. Both discs sound great, the remastering by one-time band member Bob Weston maintaining the rumbling fuzz while bringing a clarity that makes the hooks shine.

It’s enough to have these albums on CD, but Merge has sweetened the deal with 7″ tracks, radio sessions and outtakes. The nine bonus tracks on the debut include the A and B sides to its first single, “Sea Cruise” and “Greasy Spine,” an early comp appearance in “Tree Stomp” and the band’s manic cover of Prince’s “1999.”

The 11 bonus tracks on All Night Lotus Party begin with a medley of the Beatles “Polythene Pam” and the band’s own “Greasy Spine,” which is preceded by Prescott saying, “There isn’t room on this tape.” The Amboy Dukes’ “Journey to the Center of the Mind” and Spinal Tap’s “Jazz Odyssey” also are tackled, all sounding pretty much like what you’d expect. A strange bit of studio trickery, “Walk Around Dub” is also exactly as advertised, while three songs that would eventually appear on the band’s follow-up, Bumper Crop (Here’s hoping these do well enough that Merge will bring it out next) — “Time Off,” “Magic Sky” and “Curse of the Name” — show up in early form. “The Central” and “Local Wise Man,” which appear as bonus tracks on The Bright Orange Years, also showed up on Bumper Crop.