Album Review: Voxtrot, s/t

I did manage to find the cover art for Voxtrot on their website, but I'll be damned if I kick off my 200th post without a picture of one pissed-off cow-cat

Voxtrot, "Mothers, Sisters, Daughters, & Wives" - Anyone who's ever taken the time to listen to Voxtrot - a demographic which, I assume, includes everyone reading this post - will be roughly as surprised to learn that Austin's second-finest musical byproduct came up with a really good debut album as they would be to see Oprah on the cover of O (FINALLY AN OPRAH JOKE ON GP). The question, then, becomes "how good is it", since albums demonstrating the kind of singularity-within-a-multitude which courses through Voxtrot like blood through a vein obviously need to be catalogued, poked, prodded, probed, plumbed, perfectly calibrated to fall into place along one's party lines. By "the question", of course, I mean "the question I will absolutely not be answering here today"; I barely even care where Voxtrot ranks among my top-five albums of 2007, let alone yours (having said that, it's probably my third- or fourth-favorite full-length of the year). I am far more interested in "how it's good" than I am in "how good it is", and not because Voxtrot is some masterpiece of album assembly or musical vision or what-have-you. It's not. It's just a good album - a really good album - but it's important to remember that there's just as much to learn from simple, non-insistant records as there is from show-stopping earthquakes rendered in shellac. In other words (and at the risk of my musical-Yoda-only-with-dick-jokes schtick wearing even thinner than it already has), Sound of Silver may have taught me more about what kind of music I like, but Voxtrot's already taught me more about how I like it, and I've only had the record for like three weeks.

The point of reference to which I keep returning is Midlake's* The Trials of Van Occupanther, which is a little ironic since Midlake's 2006 opus is pretty much exactly the opposite of what I'm talking about when I refer to the nebulous concept of a "good album". Van Occupanther proudly features between three and five of my absolute favorite songs from all of last year and organizes the album to deliver them in an incapacitatingly satisfying fashion, but anyone who describes it to you without using the word "flawed" is straight-up lying to your face; no album as absurdly front-loaded as Van Occupanther can lay claim to any ideal of perfection, and it's such a simple proposition that I don't even have a clause to wrap that statement up tidily. There are songs on Van Occupanther that will bore you, interludes over which you will skip with unflagging regularity, attempts at singles which will steamroll you into a state of hipster ennui ("Young Bride", I poop upon thee) - and yet, over the course of a year's worth of thinking "Y'know, I think I'd like to listen to 'Roscoe' on the way to In-N-Out tonight", I found myself coming to anticipate these lesser lights, warts and all. That's not to say that I'm running around throwing "Van Occupanther" or "Branches" on mixtapes willy-nilly; they're still tedious songs, no matter how productive the tedium they generate happens to be. But I definitely grew to be thankful for the way they spaced out the experience of the album; I'm supremely confident that I would have strangled every ounce of pleasure "Roscoe" or "Head Home" have to offer before summer ended if I hadn't forced myself to develop an affinity for another way of consuming them which had little if anything to do with my own musical prejudices, and Midlake did a heroic job of making that task as easy on me as possible, even if I don't necessarily run around extolling the virtues of their incomplete successes like I'd stumbled over some lost triumphant moment. Regardless of the circumstances, learning to adapt to situations is an indelibly good thing, and good albums have precious few lessons to impart with more lucidity than those pertaining to the way we adapt to them. After all, great albums are a piece of piss to approach on their terms; that's kind of the point. Good albums simply are what they are, and it's up to you to find value in them.

Which of course brings us right back to Voxtrot. Unlike The Trials of Van Occupanther, Voxtrot has little to no downtime; some might even be compelled to describe it as a model of consistency on all musical fronts, from influences cited to song structure probably down to even the level of major keys employed from track to track. Unfortunately, one could just as easily describe it as a catastrophic misstep by a band who not only made their name on the backs of a few singles, but actually managed to rise to commercial prominence on the basis of three EPs for god's sakes; in the age of single-song consumption, you're just not going to see too many bands cultivate a rabidly devoted audience on the backs of products with the kind of barely-perceptible value which defines the EP as an artform. For a band, in other words, who amassed their fanbase by going HEY HERE'S THIS ONE SONG and these two other songs which are kinda pretty good BUT HEY REALLY SERIOUSLY THIS ONE SONG to come along and deliver an album as devoid of standout singles as Voxtrot, then, would at first glance appear to be career suicide; where exactly is their audience supposed to discover the pristine immediacy of tracks like pre-album single "Mothers, Sisters, Daughters, & Wives" on a record which steadfastly refuses to break stride just to exalt any single song? That's not to say that Voxtrot is some radio-hostile dirge-a-thon, of course - you could probably set your iTunes to shuffle it on repeat the next time you have all your friends over to flaunt your ironic t-shirts and stroke your calculatedly unshorn scruff while picking over Grindhouse and just wait for the "hey, kickin' party mix!" platitudes to roll in. Hell, "Kid Gloves" alone is probably going to dominate any club serving PBR on tap to an extent unseen since everyone woke up to the fact that they really only like, like, two Clap Your Hands Say Yeah songs, tops - and Voxtrot STILL refuses to cast a spotlight on it beyond putting it in the "designated hit" slot on the running order (i.e. it's track number two). Some might use the word "galling" to describe the sensation of encountering an album which operates so counterintuitively to the way you want it to work, and I would count myself among their number.

But here's the thing: that's exactly why I fully expect to still be dropping Voxtrot into my player months from now, if not outright years; even after just a few scant weeks of listening time, it's already apparent that I like a gang of songs off this album, with more emerging every time I give it another playthrough. Obviously I'm no soothsayer (although I am within three thousand copies of being a soothsayer) and as such can't really speak to my future with this record, but I feel pretty confident that it's going to take a long time for me to wear my enjoyment of its pleasures down to a bloody nubbin precisely because I can't listen to it the way I want to (or at least not yet - ask me again in a few months once I'm familiar enough with it to point out my fourth-favorite chord change). Instead of flooding my serotonin receptors en masse once or twice and then filing the album away forever, I'm giving myself over to its uniformity and, in the process, constantly stumbling over a new couplet or a squirrelled-away flourish in the background. And while I'm not worried in the least about whether or not I'll find records I end up liking more than Voxtrot over the course of the year, I'm not worried in the slightest about whether or not they'll diminish my ardor for it; my appreciation for Voxtrot has nothing to do with anything other than the record those crazy kids managed to make, and world-conquering single or not, that's one hell of an accomplishment. Voxtrot comes out on May 22nd; I suggest that you buy it. In every sense of the word, it's a keeper. (Click here to pre-order Voxtrot from Amazon.com)

*Midlake, I presume, would be Austin's third-most-successful musical export, although even the aggregate of enjoyment derived from numbers one through three aren't enough to make up for the city's hand in the unholy popularization of the fish taco. NO, NOT THAT KIND OF FISH TACO.

Slow Down Tallahassee, "So Much For Love" - Anyway, who needs albums to deliver singles while we've still got England? Slow Down Tallahassee's "So Much For Love" showed up in my mailbox in with a grip of other random sevens I'd ordered on whims from Rough Trade and has been kicking my ass ever since, album-generated context be damned; in a better, fairer world, "So Much For Love" could and would stand on its own against any competitor in the field of sparkling little indie gems married to a chugging Jesus & Mary Chain beat and fuzzed-out wanna-be Nuggets reject in triumphant fashion. Admittedly, most of this has to do with their stumbling into one of the most infectiously hooky melodies indie-pop's yielded in recent months, but don't overlook their girl-group chops - the harmonizing on those "Whoa-oh-oh-oh"s have a way of sticking in my head in ways most bands have to pay out the ying-yang to achieve, and let's not even get into the brutally urgent effectiveness inherent in the way the vocals kick through the ceiling to a higher register during the chorus. It's a damn shame South Park has conditioned a generation of movie viewers to expect any and all montages to be at least somewhat ironic in nature, because you won't hear a track this year better suited to soundtrack three minutes' worth of comic misadventures as some non-descript nerd attempts to whip himself into dateable shape for some unattainable princess at the behest of his smouldering drummer friend who becomes hotter than the fires of hell as soon as she takes her glasses off; one can practically hear the silhouettes of awkward Karate Kid poses against the backdrop of a setting sun in every passing moment. And I absolutely mean that as a compliment. (Click here to buy the "So Much For Love" 7" from Rough Trade)

The Draytones, "Keep Loving Me" - Like the View, this year's Sensational British Band Of The Rapidly-Receding Moment, the Draytones came out of the blue on 1965 Records; unlike the View, the Draytones have at least one inarguably awesome song to their name. That song is, of course, "Keep Loving Me", a doe-eyed love letter to the Kinks and the 13th Floor Elevators and all those other bands whose names have inexorably devolved into shorthand for critics too uncreative to find accurate ways to talk about really-not-very-good songs to which they clearly feel some sense of obligation since the songs came their way for free. I, however, am stupid enough to fly this shit over from England on my own dollar, so you can believe me when I say that this just fucking rocks; "Keep Loving Me" is loud and fuzzy and joyously devoid of subtlety in ways which belie a genuine enthusiasm for the idealized form at which they're clearly taking aim - you get the feeling that if the Draytones made minimal techno, they'd be beating up the genre's framework to find a way to incorporate the unrelenting skin-bashing and searing guitar tones that define their signature track. Fortunately for us, then, they've settled on nakedly revivalist pop as a vehicle, meaning that instead of being forced to look for an entry point into "Keep Loving Me" we can simply throw this song on our iPods and wait for that moment when we're able to share in the joy of lead singer Gabriel Boccazzi's shaky glee at coming back for MOARRRRRRR. If you're anything at all like me, it won't take you too long to get there, either.

ELSEWHERE
- Bloc Party may edge closer to pole position on the list of my contemporary bete noires by the moment, but I'll be damned if their stuff doesn't reliably make for some awesome remixes; fortunately the always-dependable Derek over at Good Weather For Airstrikes doesn't share in my hostility towards them and as such dug up two overpoweringly awesome remixes of "I Still Remember", Bloc Party's latest whiny opus about repressed bisexual leanings or Bush's foreign policy or the plight of the titmouse or what-the-fuck-evrrrr. The Sebastian one is incredibly great - like "Man, I've really been missing the boat on this Sebastian character, haven't I?"-type great - but if you only download one MP3 this week, make it Lull's Music Box & Tears remix, a legitimate contender for the throne of "most cosmically graceful thing I've heard since that live version of 'Heartbeats' hit last year". You are doing yourself a profound disservice if you're listening to anything else.