A quartet from the Windy City, Volta Do Mar (a Portugese term translated as “turn of the sea”) have, according to their PR, made it a point to “steer clear of Chicago’s scenester vampires” so as to listen more clearly to their own odd progressive muse. Their first full-length release, At the Speed of Light or Day is a testament to their depth of isolation, sounding less influenced by human entities than by the reflex-tugging Sony PlayStation.
Volta Do Mar is not as much fun as the Sony PlayStation, but they offer the sonic equivalent of a fast-paced racing game’s visuals. They’re cerebral and intricate, charting, in videogame colors, the same progressive rock terrain once lorded over by Rush, and lately colonized for hipsters by the likes of Tortoise. But Tortoise have been compellingly subversive about their progressive rock appropriations. There’s nothing subversive about Volta Do Mar: they play mathy, Mountain Dew-powered, videogame-inspired rock.
The largely instrumental At the Speed of Light or Day attains a dizzyingly nerdy apex by virtue of its instrumentation alone, featuring not only Jeff Wojtysiak on the very unnecessary five-string bass, but also Mike Baldwin on the nature-defying SIX-string bass! (Incredibly, neither bass player manages, on any of their 11 strings, to put any bottom-end into the music.) And Volta Do Mar is a hyperactively busy ensemble. If their note-per-minute ratio is like New York’s population per square mile, then Rush is a province in Canada. At times it becomes kind of comical, as in the insect colony busyness of “Another Air Strike Called Love” with it’s interlocking bass-guitar-bass syncopation and robotic harmonizing. There’s a dogged athleticism to the music in its relentless picking and splash-cymbal hitting that comes off like a fierce trivia standoff at a Star Trek convention.
Unusual arrangements are the norm on the album, as are juxtapositions between different textures, tempi, and dynamics. They sacrifice tone and forward motion to pull off their frantic noodling, sometimes, as in “Thoughts from the Assembly Line”, getting downright sloppy (and there’s nothing more disheartening than sloppy math rock). As to be expected, there’s too much bass guitar. Take the five and a half minute bass extravaganza “5:09 a.m.” in which one of the basses breaks away form the spastic lock step of the relentless 17-stringed cacophony to muse in the gauzy upper register. To compliment the basses, Tony Ceraulo’s frantic drumming rocks in a kind of spastically endearing way, and Phil Taylor should either be congratulated or shamed, depending on your bias, for rendering the traditionally dominant guitar utterly enfeebled. He simply can’t compete with those eleven bass strings and tries his best to show up by feverishly picking everything he plays. It doesn’t help that he chooses to play with a cheerlessly ugly guitar tone.
Things really fall apart when the band gets so excited that they trip over each other, or when they latch onto their “Chariots of Fire” theme, alternately called “Rock for Nations” and “Music for Countries”. The most successful pieces, such as the aggressive “Breaking Ribs for Tom Thayer” and the stylistically eccentric “Ransom Stoddard” stick closest to mother PlayStation, producing unnatural colors and geometric shapes to whiz by like so much digital scenery.