Missoula, Montana’s Volumen have been compared to many, many bands, and this review is no different, in that it will attempt to discern this five-member musical collective from every other garage band with their own recording equipment. Self-described as “heavy New Wave and nerd rock,” they play far-out indie punk like Our American Cousin hopped up on Pixie Sticks and dueling in the studio with toy lightsabers and old Mattel keyboards- yet Volumen are beyond even that crazy tag. The band’s fourth full-length, Science Faction (released on Missoula’s godly Wantage USA label) lovingly pays homage to intelligent sci-fi, vintage videogames,Openers “Side of a Box” and “Lush & Co.” share structural oddities with The Planet The’s quirky electro-pop (later reprised in “What I Gots (All Around)” and “I Dunno”), while “Descolada” sounds like a looser Don Caballero in terms of polyrhythms and change-ups, but with the power riffing of Audioslave. “Orson Welles Was Right,” an album highlight, meanders like Estradasphere covering a heavier James Kochalka Superstar, while heading into a slower section with just guitar solo and drums in the background, almost exactly like San Diego’s Creedle, circa Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars. “The Launch,” however, is a noise collage with Max Headroom and family doing these jittering/stuttering samples of oxymorons with an ambient wall of sound behind it. The wonderous “Last Mile” and “The Church with No Name” sound very close to the urgent prog of 31 Knots, but “Magnetic Communications” approaches the eclectic progabilly of Dreadnaught. A Fucking Champs-ish cover of Finnish classical composer Jean Sibelius’ “Finlandia” was reportedly recorded for the band’s tour of Finland and the Baltic states, and “Dune” offers a Black Sabbath-like, instrumental pastiche dedicated to Frank Herbert’s famed desert world. Almost as an afterthought, closer “So What” immediately takes fans back ten years to the easygoing, Old World pop of When the Wind Blows-era Creedle. Ultimately, Volumen mix the playfulness of The Planet The, the indie virtuosity of C Average, and the metal squawk of the Fucking Champs for the most headbanging

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