Volk Soup: 10p Jazz
Cassette | DL | Vinyl
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Volk Soup bring eclectic, brass-infused post-punk thrills with their debut album, 10p Jazz. Andy Brown reviews for Louder Than War.
Emerging around 2020, Volk Soup immediately proceeded to unleash a series of enigmatic and delightfully deranged singles. Songs about glassy-eyed billionaires and repulsive royalty delivered by three virile young men with a penchant for post-punk. Expanding their sonic palette with each release, the Leeds-based band proudly declared that they would, “never sound the same twice.” While developing a recognisable style, you can hear that push and pull in the music; that innate tension that invariably leads us somewhere new.
10p Jazz threatens to bring a little coherence to the chaos but rest assured, they remain a reassuringly lively bunch. Bastard delivers an unexpectedly subdued introduction and sounds like it’s crawled from the imagined swamplands of West Yorkshire. The Birthday Party minus the bats and Old Testament hang-ups. The song begins with singer Harry Jones seemingly trapped in some dark, dank cellar accompanied by a piano and the unmistakable stench of claustrophobia. Seconds later, this murky malaise is rudely interrupted by a flurry of marching drums, frenzied brass and gloriously twisted noise.
While the band began life as a three-piece, their debut album sees them expand to eight musicians and employ an impressive plethora of instrumentation. Sax, trumpet, cello, accordion, glockenspiel, lap steel, piano, synth and singing saw gleefully collide with bass, drums and guitar. Oh, and there’s even a little bit of electric drill for all you industrial purists. This is the Volk Soup you perhaps know and rightly love yet they’ve evolved and grown into a many-headed post-punk beast.
Reptilian Brain finds the band offering up something comparatively straightforward yet admirably relentless. When the sax kicks in, you may very well find yourself flailing around like an over-excited Kermit the Frog. I know I did. Professionalism Debunked arrives next with some slightly feral, ridiculously excitable backing vocals. To my ears, they sound like a gang of rowdy pirates on shore leave. Remarkably, they’ve managed to capture the spontaneous spirit and frantic energy of their live – soon to be legendary – performances.
Friends slows things down and adopts a jazzy, supremely sleazy barroom swing. “Well, I’ve got friends and it’s not hard to get on” swoons Jones as he slips and slides through the song, “But no one comprehends that soon, one day, all of this will be gone.” The singer fully embracing his role as post-punk lounge singer come barstool doomsayer. The band lean into their love of brass throughout the record: from the filthy jazz vibes on Friends to the bright trumpet lines of Holy Building Tourist. The latter is a short, sprightly and optimistic little number that reminds me of prime Julian Cope.
Mass Village Angst ramps up the insanity once more as it starts up with a manic, slightly garbled chant. What follows feels joyously unhinged. Ryan Walker’s bass racing through the heart of the track as everything continues to escalate and eventually unravel. Nothing In Tomorrow is euphoric, kinda catchy and completely unafraid to fall into brass-filled madness at a moment’s notice. Exhilarating stuff. One thing’s for certain; the whole album is going to be an absolute blast when they play it live.
As well as being one of the more interesting song titles, Spellbound By The Phallus also happens to be the eight-minute pièce de resistance of the entire album. Jones barks, croons and intones his way through the bands irresistibly funky and wild propulsion. When he barks “spellbound” I can practically see a young Mr. Nick Cave (well before his royal coronation attending days). It’s a cathartic, shamanistic magic spell of a song. The final track, Meet Me By The Willow, catches me completely off guard with a haunting – slightly folky – dreamlike drift into the abyss. Beautiful but unsettling, just how I like it.
With 10p Jazz the band have managed to successfully hang on to the thrilling chaos and eclectic spirit of their early singles while creating a debut album that feels satisfyingly cohesive. The energy that some bands seem to struggle to accurately capture in the studio certainly hasn’t been an issue here either. It’s the next best thing to having the band play in your front room (and marginally less likely to lead to broken furniture). 10p Jazz has sonic links to everyone from The Pop Group and This Heat to The 80’s Matchbox B-Line Disaster yet it remains an undeniably distinctive and impressively impassioned piece of work.
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Volk Soup can be found on Bandcamp, Facebook and Instagram.
All words by Andy Brown. You can visit his author profile and read more of his reviews for Louder Than War here.
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