Vaux

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More About

• Rock Island
• Quentin Smith

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Watching Vaux (appearing Friday, September 17, at Rock Island) play in a basement years ago, you'd never have guessed that this is where they'd wind up. The group was called Eiffel then, and while its brand of hook-laden emo was clearly more ambitious than most, the players' visceral, subterranean intensity seemed aptly accommodated by someone's cellar. But now, four CDs and tons of high-profile tours later, Vaux has finally fully shed the underground with Plague Music. In five meteoric songs, the disc climbs, swoops and dives erratically in a turbulent squall of prog-metal and hardcore, interspersing Quentin Smith's tonsil-scalding vocals with operatic riffs worthy of either Queen or Failure. The hooks, though, have never left, and this new effort ends up being even more infectious than last year's epidemically successful There Must Be Some Way to Stop Them. Vaux will always have its roots firmly sunk in the world of house shows and DIY punk. But Plague Music? This shit belongs in a coliseum.