Invisible Sports - 'The Future Tastes' (Alt.Vinyl)

If we ever make it to the Vs you'll discover I have a bunch of Volcano the Bear records; most of them, in fact. I love those guys, and just recently got their 20th anniversary box set Commencing, which is massive. Somehow along the years with all of the side projects,  I totally forgot about Aaron Moore's solo song-based LP from 2012, The Future Tastes, which is some of the most polished and 'accessible' songcraft the man's ever released. His voice is unmistakeable, not a conventional singing voice but not a bad one either. These are fully arranged pop songs, a bit off-kilter (it's hardly sounding like Lady Gaga), but not as demented or damaged as Volcano (until the end). Some VtB tracks could just be Aaron solo, but they are of a different ilk - The Future Tastes is approached from a different philosophy, and that translates into a slightly trance-like take on post-rock, with an almost lounge flavour. And they're nice tunes, whether it's the jazzy inflections of 'Jesus Auto Sound' or the surreal psychedelia of 'Man Wakes Up With Wins'; Aaron's songs are oddly genteel, often using piano or keyboards, a light touch on percussion/drums, a lot of trumpet (some quite processed or at least played weirdly), and some nice details around the edges. 'Silence is What We're Made For' invokes a sentimentality rarely heard in Volcano songs, and I like it - it's an updating of 'Hello, Graham' in terms of mood, brought into a later stage in his musical career but coming from the same place of odd thoughtfulness. There's a lot of tonal percussion throughout this record –xylophones, or maybe it's marimba, or vibes, or even some sort of tuned drums – and they give the proceedings a mildly exotic flavour. Rhythmically, it's more subtle than it sounds at first, with the bass playing (upright, I think) often pushing against the vocal melodies and the drumming to make something not quite hypnotic, but suggestive. Side two has some more loose experiments, such as 'Hopfull' (a pause-button edit work that's the most 'electronica' this record gets, or 'Lovelove', which is all dub-like studio fuckery around a few repeated vocal phrases. It all concludes with 'It's a Warhorse', a thick song built over two endless organ chords, with all manner of scraping and screaming smaller sounds layered within. This is close to the mic, breathy, deep Moore, an intimate experience that is offset by the strangeness of the music. It's like all of the light grooves of the rest of the record are pushed away in favour of an intense, somewhat monotonous epic. It feels the most like a VtB outtake here, and I wonder if it was added to fill out running time or to make a link back to the mothership, so to speak. Either way, it's intriguing, and it wouldn't be Aaron Moore if everything was too harmonious from start to finish.