By It’s our Bandcamp Picks of the Week, featuring the long lost unreleased album from one-off supergroup Volcano, out now via Don Giovanni, and the touching indie pop of Merpire’s sophomore effort MILK POOL!
Volcano – S/T
Genre: Alternative Rock
Favorite Tracks: “Pine Cone,” “Twisted Seeds,” “Some Kind of Light”
Transportational to an era of fading ‘90s rock music at pretty much any point over the last two decades, the difference between VOLCANO being released in 2004 or 2025 would’ve been negligible. The lost album from a supergroup of the same name, featuring Meat Puppets singer-guitarist Curt Kirkwood, Sublime drummer Bud Gaugh, Ziggens bassist Jon Poutney, and Skunk Records founder Michael ‘Miguel’ Happoldt, has just recently seen the light of day via Don Giovanni Records. And, as promised, it arrives preserved from its early 2000s cocoon, a shopped around but eventually shelved collection of held out tones and tomes that sound like the sum of their parts, only with a now earned nostalgia.
Kirkwood’s signature arid delivery combined with the band’s dried out desert rock sound reveals VOLCANO in its best moments to be something more akin to a lost Meat Puppets album—the steps away from this and, say, TOO HIGH TO DIE, are not that dramatically different outside of the swapped out personnel. You can hear the swashbuckling charm of songs like “Pine Cone,” “Love Mine,” “Blown Away,” and “Run Aground,” and imagine them sitting comfortably next to the band’s straight-ahead ‘90s mainstream era. The spindly outliers on the record, like the reggae stomp of “It Doesn’t Matter,” or the rootsy whistle-along “Lonesome Ghost,” offer playful visions of a different project created during a different time and under different circumstances. VOLCANO, in ways good and bad, sounds shackled to the A&R’d confines of trying to “sell” a record in the twilight of the post-grunge, an album compiled by established musicians fusing their talents together into something a major label could’ve talked themselves into even three or four years earlier. The parallels to this album and Eyes Adrift’s 2002 self-titled debut should be noted; a supergroup also featuring Kirkwood and Gaugh, anchored with Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic, that album similarly finds comfort in well worn alternative rock ideas (also itself a Meat Puppets’y lost record), while sprinkling in sonic outliers like the funhouse mirror cowpunk cut “Dottie Dawn & Julie Jewel,” or the spacy 15-minute jam closer “Pasted.”
I don’t think VOLCANO, had it been released as intended in the mid-2000s, would’ve gone anywhere—few bands were still coasting on this kind of sound at that time, and Kirkwood and Gaugh had already seen EYES ADRIFT fight a similar uphill battle. But these albums themselves are unturned rocks, mining sounds that remain classically nostalgic and unearthed to this day. Even if imperfect, VOLCANO is undoubtedly one of the best reissues and lost albums that will be released this year. Go listen on Don Giovanni’s Bandcamp! [CJ Simonson]
Merpire – MILK POOL
Genre: Indie Pop
Favorite Tracks: “Leaving With You,” “fig.8,” “Fishing,” “Retriever”
The term “fluid” best captures MILK POOL, the latest from Merpire, alias of Rhiannon Atkinson-Howatt. The Melbourne singer-songwriter takes solace in the moniker to deliver intensely relatable, ever-changing experiences of youth—early crushes, potential advances, obsessions, first kisses and all the sort—while restraining her bubbling emotions. MILK POOL was largely conceived at the end of an old relationship, but that tension, as brutal as it can be, is indeed fluid. The swaying Soccer Mommy-inspired riffage across the album lets Atkinson-Howatt float into the pressure, gently washing over her like a soft catharsis.
The listener’s hand is similarly held across this journey, like on the driving guitar opener “Leaving With You.” The principal line, “I only stay in the hope of leaving with you,” immediately spells the sense of self-reclamation Atkinson-Howatt is brewing. “Premonition” further teases this notion, with its chilled but trepidacious backdrop that matches the attitude she brings on the track: “I get a premonition we are alone / And we fuck around.” The vivid vulnerability becomes apparent with unsuspecting musical peaks and troughs, such as the nostalgia-tinged “Cinnamon” being followed by the climbing, electric “fig.8”—the latter showcasing Atkinson-Howatt’s impressive vocal range. Shimmering chords adorn fuller standouts “Fishing” and “Retriever,” until bowing out to the lo-fi, acoustic recording “You Are Loved,” a song in the complete opposite direction: solitary intimacy. Atkinson-Howatt’s new set of touching Merpire songs depicts how good can come from a bad situation, and that in itself is euphoric. Check out MILK POOL on Bandcamp. [Dom Lepore]
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