Behold the 2000s, a wild time when just about anyone could post on Blogger and thrust a young band to sudden, often fleeting success. Here at Pitchfork, we were always carping about the speed and caprice of the hype cycle we were relentlessly perpetuating. It could get like, “Oh, you’re still on Glaswegian twee? Sorry, we’re on to French house and library music, and then we’re booked solid with chillwave until the big fingerstyle guitar revival.”
Voxtrot are an exemplary case: The Austin-based indie-pop band lived a whole life between 2005 and 2010. Singer, songwriter, and guitarist Ramesh Srivastava had gone off to college in Scotland and brought back UK influences that were still trendy in the wake of Belle & Sebastian and Camera Obscura: the Smiths, Orange Juice, the C86 tape, Sarah Records. They became blog-rock darlings for two self-released EPs—later collected as Early Music—that revved up the cuddles with dance-punk fun and sounded like they were recorded by homunculi inside a flannel-lined shoebox. The peak-twee EPs are redolent of their moment in micro-history but also transcend it, standing up as classics of their kind. I love them so much.
Then, Voxtrot was snapped up by a subsidiary of Beggars Group, a big professional label. They weren’t ready. Their 2007 self-titled debut album has a couple of great songs where they dare to be Coldplay, highlighting Srivastava’s modestly ravishing singing, but overall, it sounds tentative and uncertain. The record underperformed and the blogs moved on. In 2010, the band called it quits with a final tour that, with a typically melo-romantic flourish, they called “Goodbye, Cruel World.”
The world that greets their second record, Dreamers in Exile, can be even crueler, with the human messiness of the 2000s mp3 blogs now replaced by data-driven, automated gatekeeping. But if we can briefly put aside the violent death throes of civil society, and speak only of music, there are ways that it’s a kinder world, too.
We live in times that are more relaxed about categories, for example—a change the band embraces on Dreamers in Exile, which mixes the old Smiths-y sound with more classic rock, contemporary pop, and country. Times when indie rock doesn’t shy away from politics, where a lyric like, “They judge the brown skin like birth was my sin,” as Srivastava sings on the dancefloor SOS of “Another Fire,” fits more comfortably within the genre. Times when a gay man from Texas needn’t rely on ambiguous pronouns and discreet interviews to court a broad audience.
Against this backdrop, the most striking thing about Dreamers in Exile is its liberated vitality. It’s a cathartic comeback, less coy than their first run, more convulsive and convicted. But aside from the audible joy of free self-expression, it’s remarkable how much hasn’t changed. Jason Chronis’ bass still does load-bearing work in the long, loping melodies, which Matt Simon carpets with tensely accented drumming. Srivastava’s voice, running through tight turns like a bright brook of water, still jogs as quick and clear as it did in 2005.
There’s something unfathomable about the idea of a fully grown-up Voxtrot, a world-collapsing paradox that these achingly ingenuous songs avoid. “I still wrestle with the vices of a teenage punk,” Srivastava admits on the anthemic disco-rock single “Fighting Back.” While the candor of the lyrics is new, the tone is the same: He still taps into the urgency and grandeur of a freshman-year diary. His long, spiraling sentences look unsingable on the page, but he can stretch them as tight as a trampoline and bounce lighter than air. Seldom does a mature comeback sound so much like a big-dreaming debut.
But perhaps that’s what this is: their first album-length statement of what they want, not what they desperately hoped others wanted. Dreamers has flat spots here and there, but its messianic clarity never has trouble filling the room. Past the lush intensity of “Another Fire” and “Fighting Back,” there’s the skygazing power-pop of the title track: a whirl of being 19, in Europe, in love, listening to Joy Division on the Champs-Élysées. There’s the unadorned simplicity of “The Times,” an underplayed Voxtrot strength. “Esprit de Cœur” splits the difference between the sweetness of Stars and the soul of George Michael. The Western guitar runs saddle-stitching “My Peace” display a band doing more than nostalgically remembering its heyday. The record has the contemporary frisson of a culture realigning itself—the energy and inspiration of, as Srivastava sings on “Another Fire,” “defining our world by who we are now.”
