Volplane Retrospective (1997-1999)

Awhile back, around when this blog first started, I did a post on the band Bright Channel. In the post I made reference to Volplane, which BC members Jeff Suthers and Shannon Stein both played in alongside drummer Dicky Bosse. Sadly, the group was only around for a short period of time and during that time they recorded two albums that never saw the light of day. For the longest time, their self run label of Flight Approved only contained small snippets of Real Audio samples of a couple of songs. If you’re anything like me, Real Audio just isn’t an option these days, let alone to even have it on a computer at all. Thankfully though, after a bit of time seeing it briefly mentioned on the website, there has been a nice big 17 track retrospective of the band released through the label.

Released on July 25th, the retrospective contains many of the tracks that were originally on the two unreleased albums Merlot and Volplane. It really is nice to finally get to hear all of these tracks rather then having to settle for the 5 or 6 songs you could pull off of Soulseek if you looked hard enough. Even those were barely above a listenable quality though. A big thanks to Suthers and Stein for putting this out, it’s most definitely worth it to those that have been listening to Bright Channel and the various other projects they have been involved with.

With this retrospective you can easily see where the sound for Bright Channel came about. Volplane, in very much the same way, carried that sort of dark mysterious vibe that I really like about Bright Channel. It’s really great to sort of see this progression of sorts from band to band. Volplane, while not as glaringly loud upon first listen, was I think much more of a traditional shoegaze act in that they have many more fragile sounding moments in the music and that classic shimmering guitar feedback.

Volplane – Black [MP3]
Volplane – Two Worlds [MP3]

For the shoegaze lovers out there, I can’t stress enough to go to the Flight Approved site and pick this up. It’s a great collection of material that had been pretty much nonexistent up until this point. Had this been properly released in some way during its time, it would have no doubt been right up there with the best of them. Also, don’t forget to check out all of the other Flight Approved projects like Moonspeed, Pteranodon, and of course Bright Channel.