In September, the group's singer, Ramesh Srivastava, took to his blog (thevoxtrotkid.blogspot.com) to admit, "I have never felt such an immense sense of pressure and expectation." And in a pre-album song called Your Biggest Fan, he turned that fear into a petulant refrain: "I used to be your biggest fan/Now I find that you are slipping in my estimation."
Maybe all that fretting paid off because Voxtrot's self-titled debut album is marvelous: a collection of 11 tightly coiled songs, loud and fast and sweet. Srivastava is an unapologetic overwriter, cramming stanzas full of details and songs full of stanzas. In Ghost, he dashes through 12 quatrains, ricocheting from a plainspoken confession ("I don't ever want to be alone like this") to a cryptic vow ("I have no choice but to be vicious on my feet/I never sleep, I never eat").
The band sounds pretty vicious, too, in a wimpy sort of way. It's bigger and louder than before; agitated strumming still pushes the songs forward, but now strings and horns add bursts of harmony and noise. And Srivastava never stops wriggling, as if that were the only way to keep pressure and expectation at bay. In Firecracker, even the catchy chorus becomes a contortion: "Oh, did you turn your back on me?/Or did. I. Turn. My. Self./Oh, against myself, oh?" One fears — well, hopes — that Srivastava is already tying himself in knots, trying to figure out how on earth his band will top this.— ny times news service
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