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Voxtrot (and the culture of right now)

An Austin indie band on the verge of...something...talks art, tech and passion

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Man, Voxtrot's rehearsal space is just so indie rock.

A ramshackle stucco house that used to be a preschool; to walk in is to take the proverbial quantum leap back to 1993, when it looked like independent guitar rock was on the verge of dominating the pop music discourse, when major labels were snapping small bands up in often ill-advised (for both sides) attempts to capitalize on the tastes of nerdy college radio DJs and dedicated club rats.

The space doubles as a house for Voxtrot drummer Matt Simon and keyboard player Jared Van Fleet and a couch is shoved off to one wall. A brand new (and very heavy) guitar amp sits in one corner. "I haven't even recorded with that yet," soft-spoken guitarist Mitch Calvert says. (Everyone in Voxtrot is soft-spoken and 25 or younger.) "That just came in the mail. I kept asking them to leave it at the door and the post office was like, 'We can't leave something like this just sitting in front of the house, man.'" Scattered around are drums, keyboard stands, amps and the usual maze of cords on the floor.

There's also a computer with a cable modem next to the wall opposite the couch and it's this item, as much as the band-house living room or the instruments, that symbolizes the biggest difference between indie rock's golden age and now.

Friday, Voxtrot celebrates the release this week of its debut full-length album with a show at Emo's. "Voxtrot" is a darker and more detailed album than hardcore Voxtrot fans might expect from the band that seemed to single-handedly bring twee pop back from the dead. It's being released on Playlouder Records, a division of the semi-mighty Beggar's Banquet family of labels, which includes such taste-making outfits as Matador, XL and Too Pure. Not bad for a band that had three stylish CD-EPs to its name, fewer than 20 songs released in five years of being a band.

But perhaps more important than the physical recordings is Voxtrot's status in the increasingly important world of music blogs, something that flat out didn't exist in indie rock's heyday.

Sure, there were plenty of fanzines. Usenet and e-mail prompted the rise of music-centric discussion groups and mailing lists. But with readily available MP3 and fannish commentary, music blogs (and their spiritual godfather, the music Website Pitchfork) have turned taste-making into a daily activity, feeding the music geek's frenzy to be up on something before everyone else.

No question —Austin's Voxtrot owes its success to their popularity with music blogs. But they're not completely sure how they feel about it.

In the summer of 2002, Voxtrot formed as a vector for singer and guitarist Ramesh Srivastava's songs, a studio-project to document his muse before heading off to Scotland for school. The band found itself playing the occasional Austin gig when Srivastava was on breaks.

These shows were, as many recall, a little loose, the somewhat chaotic guitar pop of, well, a band of serious Smiths fans who didn't rehearse all that much.

"Sometimes it was sheer coincidence that we were hitting the same chords," keyboard player James Van Fleet says between bites of bagel. "I'd look over at (bassist) Jason (Chronis) and try to see where his fingers were."

After a few years of on and off shows, 2005 saw the release of Voxtrot's first CD-R and a handful of out-of-town gigs, including a really fortuitous one in January in New York that happened to be noticed by the then-new music blog Brooklyn Vegan (brooklynvegan.com).

Voxtrot's manager, James Minor, posted something about the gig on his own Website, which was set up a bit like a blog. "There were so few New York music blogs at the time that they all read each other's stuff," Van Fleet says. "Brooklyn Vegan mentioned our show, our first New York show, and linked to some songs. It was a total fluke."

Brooklyn Vegan (who declines to reveal his real name) started the national ball rolling Jan. 7. 2005, when he described our heroes' upcoming New York debut as "most likely worth checking out anyway for a band from Austin, Texas, called Voxtrot."

"I think music blogs in general have a lot of impact in spreading the word about new bands," Vegan said in an e-mail recently. "Even if the vast majority of people aren't reading them, many working members of the music industry and mainstream press are reading them."

"Voxtrot were absolutely beneficiaries of the blog-rock phenomenon," says Dead Oceans Records co-owner and former Emo's local booker Phil Waldorf. "Bands that tend to do well on the Web are bands that have an audience who sit in front of computers. I bet Voxtrot does pretty well in digital sales." (Indeed. Srivastava says nearly half of the sales for the band's 2006 EP "Your Biggest Fan" have been online.)

Voxtrot are hoping that fans will want a copy — either digital or physical — of the new album as well. Where the group's early EPs had a marked light pop sense and bouncy rhythms, "Voxtrot" is a different animal — darker, crankier, more lush.

"The new stuff was a lot more painstaking," Srivastava says of the layered tunes on "Voxtrot." This is what happens when you have a real recording budget, some time to think things through and a real producer in the form of Victor Van Vugt (PJ Harvey, Nick Cave).

"We played the initial tracks live, but would occasionally max out the number of tracks for the string section," Srivastava adds. Yes, a string section. On over half the songs. No wonder they're playing Friday with the Tosca String Quartet.

So no more knocking out quick-fire twee pop just for grins? Srivastava demurs. "When I was in Europe, I got so sick of listening to our new one I swore to book studio time when we got back to town." The photos that accompany this piece are from that session, which should produce a new single sometime in the coming year.

Of course, now the trick is figuring out how to live by the Internet without dying by it. Srivastava keeps a blog (thevoxtrotkid.blogspot.com) and over at reaching4lasers.com, a friend has posted brief clips of an ongoing documentary about the making of the album.(The blog attention is translating to big-time print recognition, such as a review this week in The New York Times.)

All of the band members agree that, given their tech savvy and seriously devout fanbase, a leak of their album was absolutely inevitable. "Voxtrot" began appearing on the Internet in mid-March; physical copies hit stores on Tuesday.

"I was a little surprised it leaked so far away from the release date," Calvert says. "That was pretty distressing. If it had leaked in early May, eh."

"I think there's way too much of a tendency to blame the leak if something goes wrong with sales," Van Fleets says. "If the music is good, it'll help."

"I think with this record it's good that it leaked so early," Srivastava says. "Especially for fans of the older material, this one takes a bit of time to get used to; it's a bit of a grower so it's probably good." He pauses. "But then again, if it's different and you wanted to make an impact with the fact that it's different, then it becomes a problem."

These are questions that all bands face, but it seems a little more acute for these guys. Their careers have been shaped by forces that seem in competition: the trainspotting blog reader and the indie rock record nerds who enjoy holding the physical record in their hands.

But several members of the band noted that there are much bigger cultural issues at stake. "The people who download a lot of music sort of collect it, without any intention of ever attaching themselves to it," Srivastava says. "That's a sad way to live.

"The culture of immediate gratification that exists — and not just immediate, but immediate and instantly disposable gratification — is out of hand. Before something is even out, some people have to have it and make a judgement about it and move along."

On his blog Blissout, (blissout.blogspot.com) critic Simon Reynolds makes a similar point when reporting on "The Future of Thinking About Music," one of the panels at the most recent Experience Music Project pop music conference. There was much hand-wringing about shrinking word counts, but, as Reynolds notes, "Amy Phillips, Pitchfork's news editor, ... more or less chided the assembled for thinking like dinosaurs: She invoked a new breed of youth today who want their info RIGHT THIS MINUTE and don't have time to read (or write) considered and extended reviews, let alone think pieces."

Reynolds writes he reacted almost viscerally. "An involuntary cry rose up from the core of my being: 'NOOOOO!!! Slow- it - down. Marinate, reflect.' " (He also noted that, ironically, Pitchfork has a reviews section with fairly long pieces.) (It's also worth noting that Pitchfork has been very good to Voxtrot.)

It's a debate that's impossible to resolve, but it's one that, barring a massive technical singularity in the next few years, will likely be around for the life of the band. "The Internet sort of boomed in a way that helped support music at the same time we were putting music that Internet-savvy people like on the Internet," Mitch says (and man alive, does that look like a Gertrude Stein quote).

While nobody is quite sure where this new paradigm will go, Voxtrot seems to be in a pretty good position.

"When singles were the dominant format, there were lots of regional hits and a lot of people were spending their money on records that not everyone across the country would have heard of," Van Fleet says. "There's a similar thing happening now, but instead of being geographical it's subcultural. People are really able to dig into the type of music they like even if that music isn't really appreciated across the board. Instead of 100 people buying the same record, those 100 people are all buying different records."

Srivastava, who has been listening, looks up: "There are all sorts of media competing for everyone's time," he says. "but music is a qualitatively difference experience. I don't think there will ever be a time when that is denied."

jgross@statesman.com; 912-5926

THEIR BIGGEST FANS: VOXTROT VS. BRITPOP

So like many outsiders in the long, sad history of alienated adolescents, Ramesh Srivastava took solace in music when he was in high school, leaning on '60s pop, dance music and indie rock giants such as Belle and Sebastian and, especially, the Smiths. He futzed around in bands with drummer Matt Simon when he was a teenager before escaping to the East Coast for college, where he lived with guitarist Mitch Calvert. They formed Voxtrot in 2002, rounding out the group with bassist Jason Chronis and Jared Van Fleet on keyboard.

Over the next four years, the band tightened up and toured plenty. By the end of 2006, Voxtrot had produced three smart-looking CD-EPs and handful of limited singles in the U.K. Dead Oceans Records co-owner Phil Waldorf says these recordings created a bit of a myth for themselves. 'Releasing really good looking EPs was very smart,' Waldorf says, commenting on the Voxtrot EPs uniform design and heavy paper sleeves. 'It's a really digestible amount of music and you could really fetish over them.'

As one might expect, given Voxtrot's music, much of the Austin band's graphic sense seems inspired by the Smiths. 'Nobody ever used the EP format better,' Srivastava says. 'They had their own look and those three songs really felt like an event, like something you would really enjoy having in your hand.'