If there's one thing to feel relieved about where our nostalgia-crazed moment is concerned, it's that we as a society may finally get around to losing all that annoying, self-aware awkwardness about vintage loverman R&B. The coke-chic irony, the automatic equation of wah-wah guitar with mustachioed porno kitsch, the focus on caricaturized libido at the expense of the chops of the singers who gave voice to it-- that all has to go. The alt/indie sphere did its best to work through those issues via stage-winking outlets like Har Mar Superstar and Midnite Vultures, but they were still steps towards an ability to approach the influence of Prince or Michael Jackson or Hall and Oates without requiring 15 layers of self-conscious distancing.
Yet to pull it off, you need to remember that old joke about how important sincerity is: Once you learn to fake it, the rest is easy. For Evan Voytas-- a Los Angeles multi-instrumentalist singer who sounds like he had to wade his way through Beck's "Debra" to get to Prince's "The Beautiful Ones"-- that kind of commitment seems completely out of his grasp. The question of whether someone really means it when an artist dredges up old sounds isn't going away anytime soon, and after a couple of EPs and an abysmal, shrill-yet-affectless cover of "Nothing Compares 2 U", it's the only question left to ask about Voytas' music. His latest EP, Feel Me, drops as a short but grueling tour of some of the most cloying, feeble soul-without-soul to dribble lamely out of wherever. The Playskool pop-funk that Voytas mistakes for peak Jam/Lewis is sickly enough: It stumbles around to hit a few loosely modernized, synth-driven takes on half-remembered Hi Records backbeats ("When We Could All Float Away"), L.A. Doobies/Dan studio rock cut with baking powder ("You Don't Even Know Where It's At"), and perfunctory boogie funk with all the propulsive energy of a Casio preset ("Can't Let Anybody Know Who You Are"). There's actually a recurring melodic shrug in the title track that stops two notes short of the stereotypical faux-Chinese riff that Carl Douglas used for "Kung Fu Fighting". Sir Nose lives.
But the problem above everything else is his voice-- you can't get around it, under it, or away from it, much less into it. At its most innocuous, there's a sort of Owl City twerpiness to it, a softbatch indifference trying to pass for mysterious shyness. But he also leans toward a high wail so shrill-- imagine Barry Gibb as Jon Lovitz's "Annoying Man"-- that any potential sincerity comes across as a desperate affectation. It's drenched in this grating nasal sibilance that sounds like an eye-rolling whine no matter what the message is. And there's a noncommittal emptiness to all that pitched-up whimpering-- loosely reflected in the deep-as-their-titles themes of songs such as "When We Could All Float Away", "The Weightlessness", and "Can't Let Anybody Know Who You Are"-- that makes it impossible to catch on to any real drive or desire. You can't feel something that doesn't feel anything.
