crypticcradle's Full Review: Mothers, Sisters, Daughters & Wives [EP] by Voxtro...
Sometimes I feel as if I'm expressing the same thing over and over again when I'm putting words to the music and books and philosophies of teaching I hold. Maybe I'm drawing too easily a hard-to-reach connection, but it would seem to me that no matter whether I'm expressing the madness, the hot-softness, the preciousness, the sadness, or whatever sorts of experiences that prevail in art that I enjoy and the evolving philosophy to which I subscribe, I am describing the same thing, a majestic cycle of pleasure and pain and never-sleeping life. I can describe Kanye West's "Graduation" as party anthems and nonsense to unburden yourself to and smile -- the artist's apparent intention -- or I can describe it as a melancholy wisp of tunes exhibiting the vain spirit of the common frail soul dancing and BSing and driving the minority of us into caves to hold hands and wonder -- an interpretation I can make by looking into the other end, and coming from the bent that anything appearing so careless in the majority of its construction is less-than art and a waste of a smart person's time -- or I can view it as a post-millennial statement on "kicks", where men and women have blunders, and even us males stress about how shallow everything can be and make bad poetry and say it to the gloriously free music in our heads -- a connection I can take from a more non-conformist sect, apply it to a Kanye who makes himself vulnerable in between the nonsense of most of the songs in a way completely unusual for someone with his type of fame, and put together that he has a spit of that rebellious soul which peaks its head out for the betterment of us all. Or I could mix the shallow, the sadness, the self-consciousness, and the boldness, and I could say it's just like everything else that exists on Earth, which is glib and too-easy, but I will dare to say it holds a bit of truth in it. Of course, the different textures and innovations of thought and media, non-conventional uses of conventional elements and beliefs, and everything that goes into the construction differentiates types of art and philosophy, and the artist's working knowledge of how to make the pieces fit as well as their ability to make rapid and meaningful and soulful connections between important concepts is what allows us to judge different creations against our standards, against one another, and importantly, against ourselves, who we are. Yet in the end, I take all I love, and they are all different ways to get at the core of the same thing.
So it is, after such an exhaustive explanation, that I get to the mania of life, which falls into the same place as the sadness of life, which falls into the same place as intense joys and loves and beautiful serene areas which no man can bear to look at without some sort of shade over his eyes. They all live inside each other like nude souls in the doldrums of ecstasy. Voxtrot to me are the mania of life manifested in a pop rock group, and the reason I pick "Mothers Sisters Daughters and Wives" over "Raised By Wolves" or "Your Biggest Fan" first to explore the amazing short recordings of a group finding their definitive voice before embarking on what I believe could be a legendary career is two-fold: 1) there is a song here that lays out the insanity of love in a way no man could express it through both instrumentation and lyrics of this genre, and 2) the bleeding heart is far more unabridged than in the other two recordings (though honestly "Raised By Wolves" isn't exactly what you'd consider coy or restrained, not by any stretch). In a little over 17 minutes and five tracks you are driven into the mayhem of your deepest anxiety and madness, in touch and in tact and so poetic, it's affirming in the right places if you are unafraid of such undertakings.
But how does "Mothers Sisters Daughters and Wives" encompass such mania? Over the course of this little album, lead-singer Ramesh Srivastava seems to mix sketches of written lyrics with free association, like, he sings, and when it's time to add more for meaning, he seemingly goes where the music takes him (planning and rehearsing be damned, that's what it sounds like). If that means a chorus that extends longer than the verses, straining his voice and sweating till tears and blood drip from the stereo on "Rise Up in the Dirt", or until he's about screaming the stirring, and I mean stirring BEGGING ridiculously touching too-close-to-my-life chorus on the title track before leading to mad and searching chants at the end, or even if it was written planned and rehearsed, the line from "Fast Asleep", "We don't dream we fantasize", and the way each word is pronounced so dreamily digging into the side of life and hanging on for dear death, well, a lot of this is representative of true mania, the elevation of the soul, and the artful connection of topics of the soul only someone with divergent thought processes could come up with. The music of Voxtrot is ever so key, and we'll talk more about that, but replace Srivastava with a merely good but not totally crazy lead and you have, I don't know, maybe Band of Horses or some other drag of a group.
In fact, or what I consider fact, "Mothers Sisters Daughters and Wives" is not anything to be described song by song, but moment by moment, if I could do such a thing coherently. It's not songs, it's highlights of life in verse-chorus-verse format while running off the tracks for freedom so often for such a short production. Not that the electric guitars and depressed strings of "Soft & Warm" on the close are anything but compositions of fully-realized pop in a decently conventional form, but again, to beat the hell out of the point, it's Srivastava who meanders and if he's not the one controlling all directions, I'd be shocked. Earlier in the same song the man sings of "I've seen the years go by in triple lines of grey, you were always on the ground", and that is the mania, the racing thoughts, that I'm talking about. On the surface, it's a pop song, like any other Belle & Sebastian romp, music tensing mid-chorus, creating its own climax with warm horn, but if you're not following the words, you miss the intensity of life, like daydreams that have you mumbling and moving your lips with them so so real.
Speaking of racing or heightened energy and state of being and good pop instrumentation, "Fast Asleep" is anything but slumbering, it's a step more excited than your average song, dense with guitars that speed and Srviastava plays with it moving his voice methodically along the main riffs though it sounds faster because of the major energy coming. I rarely listen to the words (save the line about fantasizing, previously mentioned, which always grabs me out of my daze) because the percussion which takes this to the race tracks of the mind drives my thoughts into nothing but sounds. The chorus of "Rise Up in the Dirt" does that too, this time in the name of passion and the potential you find when digging into your belly, as the intensity breaks the skull and sheds sunshine on your beautiful thoughts, "I could be a father, I could be a brother, I could be a flower, rise up in the dirt, when were born to live here, we were born to die here." Somber thoughts of if Srivastava were a good man, hopes and dreams and crashing. Amazing excitement.
The miracle, though, truly and unbelievably, is the title track, the song "Mothers Sisters Daughters and Wives". I have strained my vocal chords so many times with Ramesh. I wish I could write the whole of the lyrics here and listen to it with you for the first time. It's non-conformist love, the type I've always talked about, between souls with economics nowhere to be seen. Pure. It works to challenge thoughts of needing to lose love to find it. Uses extreme imagery to show the pain of growing, "Lose the body you're in to a land of angry soil, who swallows boys and coughs up men." And I think of the apocalypse on the chorus, where Srivastava's voice cracks the first and third time through, "I know that when it's over we'll be holding one another, we only ever wanted to feel real, Two years of taction only teaches you to fight, we only ever wanted to try." Please note the first half of that chorus, because that to me is the best way love has been stated in the history of humanity, "We only ever wanted to feel real." The guitars seem to be speaking another language with the same meaning around it, before they get their moment to sing their own chorus while Srivastava takes a breather. Indeed, for a pop song, the guitars are quite serious in their yearning quality, because love, the urge to "feel real", miraculous, that is the true quest in the eyes of this music, and it controls a whole lot in the wanting heart. Then it goes mad, as I once said, as Srivastava sings, "I'm around I'm around, I'm OK I'm OK, I'm alive I'm alive, I'm insane I'm insane...we are just sinking for something." I could just go on forever. I'll stop now.
In "Mothers Sisters Daughters and Wives" you find more than mania, but that, too. You find the excitement, the title track is so excited it can hardly stay in the sound waves, it dares to materialize into a life itself. It's courage, the courage to feel something, even if it's brutal and torrid and painful. It's sadness in yearning, it's joy in the search. They all live with one another, touching and holding and loving and molding. This is the greatness of Voxtrot on their first three recordings, but the mania lives the most here. This is pop rock music with shark's teeth in the lyrics, and you will get eaten alive.
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