The Voluntary Butler Scheme – The Grandad Galaxy (Split)
4/5
When you call your band The Voluntary Butler Scheme and give your record a cover as charmingly bugged out as the image that adorns the front of The Grandad Galaxy, it’s safe to say that people don’t come to your records expecting, say, Boys Noize. When people see a record that contains tracks entitled ‘To the Height of a Frisbee’ and ‘Umbrella Fight’, they want to whack it on and hear the most British album ever. Indeed, wunderkind Rob Jones knows exactly what to do with people’s expectations on his second full-length – play to them. And for the most part of The Grandad Galaxy, this tactic works very well.
The song-craft throughout cannot be faulted. Whirs of funny synthesisers and bubbly guitar licks soak through the record, and when you throw in Jones’ deadpan and always slightly muffled vocal, you could be forgiven for thinking that, at times, you might have stumbled across the sound-reel for a lost episode of The Clangers. Of course, after having seen that cover, that’s exactly what you wanted isn’t it? After the pleasantly scruffy and Mr Scruff-y shuffle of instrumental opener ‘Hiring a Car’, you get the drunken war-time rag of ‘Shake Me by the Shoulders’. As someone who had never listened to VBS before, I was reassured by ‘Shake Me by the Shoulders’ in the sense that, after hearing ‘Hiring a Car’, it sounded pretty much how I anticipated a VBS track with vocals to sound.
One thing I didn’t see coming is the large quantity of really good, wonky grooves that Jones lays down. ‘Phosphor Burn-In’ echoes ‘Shake Me By the Shoulders’ with its sweet, woozy, witty swing; ‘Astro’ is the sort of song you’d dance to with a girl you were falling for, if people still lived in black and white; and the punch-drunk clunking of ‘Don’t Rely On It, Don’t Count In’, with boozy guitars excellently framing Jones’ deadpan vocal about how great it is to be a pessimist – ‘It’s a fool who throws his wallet at the moon’, indeed.
In fact, the record’s two real disappointments are two of the shortest tracks, ‘Sky Shed’ and ‘Satisfactory Substitute’, which fail precisely because you know as a listener that there are better songs hiding in there struggling to get out. Half of the former is spent fannying around before we are treated to a mere snippet of a really promising breakbeat, and the latter sees another great Endtroducing…-esque beat ruined by an irritating lead line. These minor indiscretions are made all the more irritating when you think about how carefully put together a lot of the album is; having spent so much time on the meat of tracks like ‘Satisfactory Substitute’, it seems a shame to throw away the bones.
Still, like I said, minor indiscretions. The Grandad Galaxy is probably going to be the most homely record released this year, and it’s all the better for it. Though the whole thing does start to sag at 15 tracks long, listen to it in bursts and it can’t fail to bliss you out. And, if you’re stuck for something to do, give that guy on the cover a good old stare.
The Voluntary Butler Scheme - Laundry by EardrumsPop
Artists in this article: The Voluntary Butler Scheme
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