I have to admit that I was quite a bit apprehensive about the idea of a Volcano The Bear boxed set, as few bands are less synonymous with consistency or quality control than Leicester's erstwhile free-form experimentalists and I was never a big fan at all, despite admiring a good portion of Daniel Padden’s non-VTB work.  It was easy for me to envision Commencing as over four hours of migraine-inducing absurdist theater, random gibbering and clattering, kazoo solos, and/or someone chasing around a duck with a microphone or dropping a pumpkin into a toilet.  Or possibly all of those things within the same song.  Thankfully, I was mostly (and spectacularly) wrong, as Commencing makes a very strong case that VTB was actually one of the most inventive and compelling bands of the last two decades.  Granted, there is certainly some wince-inducing juvenilia scattered amidst all the gems, but Miasmah has done an amazing job at filtering, presenting, and contextualizing VTB's vast body of work in a form that enables a skeptic like me to finally understand why someone would want to put out a Volcano The Bear box set in the first place.