Voxtrot: Over and over

Voxtrot are going to do one more tour, and that'll be it. Why? Ramesh can tell you why. It's bloody Fran Healy's fault:

Being in Voxtrot has been wonderful and amazing, but it is only one chapter in the book...

When I was in high school, I was a great fan of the Scottish band, Travis, and I have always harbored a secret desire to meet the band's frontman, Fran Healy. Not so long ago, at my friend Lucy's studio in Berlin, I had the fortunate experience of doing just this. He was buying a painting of hers, and we spent about three hours conversing. Eventually, our conversation drifted towards the ebb and flow of our respective careers, as well as the anger that comes with not knowing how to pull oneself out of a creative rut. Obviously, our two careers have been on different scales, but nonetheless, the associated concepts are universal. At the end of the conversation, he said to me, "You can't to keep writing the same song. You have to throw away the map. AND you have to keep creating, even if it goes nowhere for a while, you have to always keep creating… and it'll be great."

And he's right. I must leave again-take a risk, do something radical, but in order to do that, I need closure. This is not to say that Voxtrot will never play again, and certainly, if Voxtrot has never been to your country (or continent) we are open to ideas, but for all intents and purposes, this series of live shows will be the last.

Part of doing something with love is being able to say "goodbye" at the right time. Thank you for everything. On to the next one...

Way to go, Fran. Couldn't you have broken up some other band?

Voxtrot trot off - again

The Voxtrot tour - which is proving about as ill-fated as Captain Oates' popping out for some time - has hit another snag. Ramesh isn't well:

Sorry everyone, but Voxtrot is canceling off of tonight's show at Club Absinthe in Hamilton, ONT. If you've seen the band in the last couple days, I'm sure you're aware that Ramesh has been a bit under the weather. He was taken to the hospital after last night's show in Philly, and underwent minor surgery this morning. Thankfully he's okay.

No word on what the minor surgery was.

Monkey trotters

Having been offered the opportunity to repeatedly hurl down a "beat that" challenge opening for the Arctic Monkeys on their US tour, with a consequent reshuffling of their own American dates.

Voxtrot: our ears are burning

Voxtrot have suddenly realised that they don't like the internet. Oddly, when their first EPs were released, and they were getting well-reviewed, they somehow forgot to mention this. Come their new album, though, and reviews placing them in the middle of the field instead of at the vanguard of new pop, and all of a sudden, they've remembered how much they hate bloggers:

"The internet is a very dark place to be," [Ramesh Srivastava] wrote. Addressing bloggers, he said, "You may think that you deserve to download an album at no cost, store it in your iPod, pass your particular judgement, and then immediately dispose of it or hype it at will, but you actually don't deserve that."

But Srivastava says the album is not one that you get immediately, and he has urged listeners to spend some time with the music, to get to know it before writing it off. It's unlike Voxtrot's earlier music, released on three short EPs and rich with hooks, melodies and sharp lyrics - in other words, perfect for immediate gratification.

As the band moves in a new direction, Srivastava hopes his young fans will be patient. He's not optimistic. He says when he was a teenager, he would buy albums at a record store and really labor over them because he had spent his money. Nowadays, he says, teenagers have no such investment.

"People in the 18 to 19 range don't understand why you would ever pay for music," Srivastava said in a phone interview with The [Baltimore] Sun. "The younger generation has never lived in that world. It's not like they're doing something intentional to degrade music. ... But everybody wants to download and everybody wants to be a music critic."

In other words: now everybody builds them up to knock 'em down.

Obviously, there is some truth in what he says - downloads don't have the same emotional impact and investment, but at the same time, suggesting that the world would be a better place if you had to invest a larger chunk of your income into each record because then you'd be stuck with it and have no choice but to play the bloody thing as you can't afford to move on. (Is it just us, or is this also the thinking behind the Tory Party's policy of giving tax breaks to married couples, so people who hate each other have to stay together because they can't afford to split up?)

The other reason why the argument is self-defeating lies at that concept of having to save up to buy a record. How wide would Voxtrot's audience have been had they had to rely on people willing to take a massive risk on investing in their EPs, unheard, as would have been the case two decades ago - to say nothing of the ease with which they've been able to find people who like the depth and angle of their singular furrows because the internet, and bloggers, have helped get them in front of audiences around the globe? Would they really have been better off trying to slowly grow an audience out of their neighbourhood, then through their city, and across the state, hoping that they'd get their discs into shops and be able to tempt enough people to take a leap of faith, with fingers crossed that they might find a sympathetic college radio or two to play their music?

There is also, of course, the possibility that people aren't warming to their music because the album isn't as good as everyone hoped.