The Vulcan Iron Works building was burned to death in 2023. Its moldering corpse – ashen bones, like the rib cage of some giant prehistoric animal, the skeletal remains of a whale, wind- and sand-blasted in a featureless desert – still gives off smoke now and then, like a ghost’s gasp, like industrial incense, like a forgotten cigarette, thin wisps of which curl into the silent dark of dawn, the morning as cold as metal, the stars slowly snuffed.
I’m not saying that River Trash Records was the firebug that brought the building down, but it was fortuitous, for its sooty hollow husk, with its electric burnt rubber musk, provided the ideal place to record a fuzzed-out, psychedelic, garage rock album, which, quite naturally, they called Vulcan Ironworks. Its openness, its cavity, is the place in which echoes are born, and it is in these reverberations that the album lives: in its warbles, its tremors, its flanges and freakouts – like flayed cables or patch cords, wires exposed to the elements, static-y hums that remind one of dead trees clothed electric insects, in cicadas, tymbals drummed and cymbals crashed in the piles of rubble, melted plastic, in the fumes and debris, in the meaninglessness of senseless wanton destruction, like a song soaked in asbestos, in pungent chemicals, in acid baths and harsh detergents.
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To read the rest of this review — and more by Steve Schmolaris — visit his website Bad Gardening Advice.
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Steve Schmolaris is the founder of the Schmolaris Prize, “the most prestigious prize in all of Manitoba,” which he first awarded in 1977. Each year, he awards the prize to the best album of the year. He does not have a profession but, having come from money (his father, “the Millionaire of East Schmelkirk,” left him his fortune when he died in 1977), Steve is a patron of the arts. Inspired by the exquisite detail of a holotype, the collective intelligence of slime mold, the natural world and the suffering inherent within it — and also music (fuck, he loves music!) — Steve has long been writing reviews of Winnipeg artists’ songs and albums at his website Bad Gardening Advice, leading to the publication of a book of the same name.
