The most thrilling way to experience the Voidz‘s third album, Like All Before You is on vinyl, imagining it as a roulette wheel, dropping the needle like a ball and seeing what you get.
The record is the most unpredictable that the group, which features Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas, has recorded since it formed more than a decade ago. Casablancas has said that he likes the capriciousness of the Voidz compared to the Strokes’ steadfast commitment garage rock. So on Like All Before You, he and his bandmates indulgea hodgepodge of emo, jazz, metal, new wave, and Temptations callouts, and each mood changes minute by minute, second by second. It’s like Midwestern weather except there isn’t a radar system sophisticated enough to track which way the wind will blow with the Voidz.
Sandwiched between synth-rock instrumentals (an overture and an outro), the album roughly follows this framework: Cure-like guitars mixed with autotune vocals (“Square Wave,” “All the Same”), video-game thrash-metal detours (“Prophecy of the Dragon,” “When Will the Time of These Bastards End?”), and new-agey Bryan Ferry moments (“Spectral Analysis”). Now picture all of those sounds cut up and rearranged; like a William S. Burroughs book, sometimes it sounds great and makes perfect sense and at other times, it creates an interzone of confusion.
So if you skip around, like the ball bouncing around the metaphorical roulette wheel, you’ll find some excellent moments — the thrashy riffage of “Prophecy,” a few new wave–leaning moments in “Flexorcist” (including the verse riff to “Der Kommissar”), and the whole of “Perseverance – 1C2S” — the most song-for-the-sake-of-a-song song here, with its consistent doomy, synth-rock feel and a Brian May–inspired guitar solo.
But you could also easily run afoul by skipping around: Casablancas’ autotune vocals are immediately irritating and distract from the songs on which he uses the effect, undoing any spell the Robert Smith–like guitars on “Square Wave” could cast. There are also some atrocious, eyeroll-ready lyrics: “I’m gonna blast her with my Stratocaster” on “Square Wave,” “Give the humas what they want/Some music for them to blow their brains out to” on “Spectral Analysis,” and a weird, plummy Vincent Price–like voice singing this humdinger: “This heathen walked uncleaven/touched land, sailed from Sweden/think his name was … Steven.” You almost welcome the callout to “Papa was a rolling stone” on the Jimmy Buffett–like “All the Same.”
As much as skipping around can be interesting, it’s difficult to listen to the album as a whole. When you hear a tuneful melody, like the vocal line to “Prophecy,” you want it to last, knowing that you might not get anything that agreeable on the next track. It’s hard to picture anyone in the mood to listen to or endure the album as a whole, since the moods change so frequently. If Casablancas is bored with the Strokes’ sturdiness, any chunk of Like All Before You ought to keep him satiated for years (OK, minutes) to come.
