The
first I heard of The Voidz (that ‘z’
still makes me angry – grow up) was the complete mauling this, their second
record, received in The Guardian in
April. Phil Mongredien’s scathing 1* review included the following statements:
‘utterly incoherent’, ‘wildly self-indulgent’ and ‘precious little worth
hearing here’. Mongredien’s biggest complaint, though, seemed to be that The Voidz sounded nothing like mainman
Julian Casablanca’s ‘other’ band, The
Strokes. Thing is, I never liked The
Strokes at all, so that comment made me go and listen to this. Mongredien’s
got one thing right, this is nothing like The
Strokes. Cause it’s really good. Casablanca has called this project
‘futuristic prison jazz’, and that insufferably pretentious self-description is
nonetheless as good as any. This record is hard to pin down. Virtue is an always interesting
polymorph: Daft Punk expero-pop on
‘Permanent High School’ or ‘Pink Ocean’ gives way to agit-punk on ‘Black Hole’,
and then ruminative acoustic heartache on ‘Think Before You Drink’. It’s a
wildly eclectic record (although not
incoherent, at least to my ears); at times quite ‘out there’, yes, but crucially
never, ever dull. Not everything works: album closer ‘Pointlessness’ is an
overly drawn out mourn-ballad, for example – but even then it’s trying
something interesting and a bit different. There’s so much here, and so much of
it is so great, that even with a few misfires and things that aren’t to my
personal taste, this is well worthy of its 6th place finish.
sample track: QYURRYUS