Voxtrot
Emo’s, Sept. 9
Remember the exuberance of leaping on the moon walk when you were knee-high? Or the sense of adventure involved in jumping into the pit of plastic, malformed balls at Chuck E. Cheese’s? Hold onto that memory, and transfer it to the inside stage at Emo’s on Friday. That might seem like a stretch, but when Voxtrot frontman Ramesh Srivastava bounces onstage, it’s even more difficult to imagine him rebounding off solid ground. As his equally ebullient bandmates grinned and danced around him, Srivastava’s angelic vox traipsed songs of love and youth, and because of this, the half of the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd that was over the age of 21 began to feel like their counterparts. As “Missing Pieces” took its place in the local sextet’s short set of bubbly, perfectly structured pop songs, craws far and wide mouthed the words to the instantly catchy hook. An impressive feat considering Voxtrot’s only releases are this year’s hopelessly repeatable Raised by Wolves EP and an older 7-inch. When the refrain of “Raised by Wolves” faded into Pavement’s “Gold Soundz,” a spontaneous clap-along exploded. Voxtrot is a time machine whisking us all back to our innocence, to a day before gangsta rap and nu-metal. Screw all those retro-hipster wannabes in black eyeliner. Voxtrot rides the wave of nostalgia without being antiquated. They add a little ray of sunshine to the Smith’s mopey din, and like those ping-ponging kids on the moon walk, they deserve immediate attention. Bring on the plastic balls and teenage crushes.
This article appears in September 16 • 2005.