Volunteer Pioneer Volunteer Pioneer

To describe Volunteer Pioneer, let's look to the band's website: "A schizophrenic told Kyle he sounded like a David Byrne rip off, and everyone in the world asks Sabrina if she knows who Joanna Newsom is... and Jason is worse than Duff McKeagan on drums. But, if David Byrne, Corky Hale and Duff McKeagan formed a band they would be called Volunteer Pioneer."

This description, cocky and tongue-in-cheek in a self-knowledgeable way, describes the music fairly adequately, not only in its name-dropping but its humorous tone; Volunteer Pioneer, at its quick 20 minutes, is fun and darkly comedic, covering love, heartbreak, death, and even domestic abuse with a slight hand. Much in the same way Arcade Fire's Funeral was an emotionally rich, albeit serious take on death and longing, Volunteer Pioneer's self-titled debut EP gives its subject matter a gentle nod and wink without sacrificing emotional accuracy. Did I mention it's unbelievably catchy?

"If I'm your tiny wife, then you're my tiny husband," Kyle Williams sings, coming off an acoustic intro that could have been lifted straight from the same handbook from which In The Aeroplane Over The Sea was constructed. It's safe to say Williams bears more than a striking resemblance to Jeff Mangum, but you could very well call Williams the older Conor Oberst. Separate Planes, a good example of everything Volunteer Pioneer has to offer, brings Sabrina Dulm's harp to the front for the melody as Dulm lends her voice for a duet. There's a sing-a-long to be found in Williams's carefree delivery ("Don't say you love me; that's extortion!"), and the song is over when the gettin's good.

Volunteer Pioneer strikes that sometimes imperfect but always sweet balance between folk and pop, almost making them interchangeable; where do The Unicorns' rolling pop attitude end and The Decemberist's driven storytelling begin in Adventure Capital? When does Tiny Violent Town go from a battle of gender and wit into a caricature of an otherwise realistic view of the opposite gender? But the album's real highlight is its ability to work in contrasts. Williams' throaty yell, coming off the rough, acoustic lullaby of Outfoxed Outfucked into the twinkling harp of Fear of Cholera, the album's defining moment. Hitting a chord in the way we cover up our mourning with humour, there's an abrasive naivety to the proceedings, from Williams and Dulm's imperfectly harmonic chorus, to the quieter passages that counterbalance its desperate final thirty seconds.

Its placement before the closing track, Funeral Scene, just proves the care that went into Volunteer Pioneer. The longest track (5:35), Funeral Scene combines the indecisive nature of mourning or denial with a sense of inevitable closure; this becomes clear during the song's halfway mark when, after a brief pause following a slow passage, the song suddenly kicks into gear with group chanting. It could have very well been a completely different song with its quiet, serene fade out of the harp. "I'm sick with fear of the undead," Williams cries. "My hands shake from the movies I've seen where the thing you love leaves and when it comes back it's not the way you had planned." With so much potential to a sometimes bloated Volunteer Pioneer, it's tragic to know that Sabrina Dulm passed away. Dulm's death, the reason the EP was pushed to the summer of 2007, gives a sort of inevitable pathos to Volunteer Pioneer and its subject matter, even making the harp fade out to Funeral Scene a more disquieting moment. (The cover itself is a tribute to Dulm.)

But to like Volunteer Pioneer is not to love it out of sympathy but to sympathise out of love; a swan song of sorts, there is hope to be found in the now defunct band's Volunteer Pioneer, one that shouldn't be overshadowed by its tragedy.