Toronto – Continuing with my ‘multicultural lead singers’ theme for this week, me and some friends made the treacherous trek down to the infamous Sneaky Dees (or Sneaky Disease as it is known) to watch Ramesh Srivastava and his band, also known as Voxtrot. Voxtrot is a band from Texas, that well..is awesome. They play twee-ish/smith-ish kind of music, and released a few EP’s last year that were fantastic. They also released a LP this year, whether you can buy it or not is completely unknown to me. Its always kinda funky to see a band fronted by a non-whitey and its becoming more and more common. A Texas band fronted by a brown guy, who woulda thought? I wonder how bad this guy got it after 9/11, its amazing he’s making such happy tunes.
The last time these guys came to town, there was like 15 people there, so it was nice to see a nicely-packed Sneaky Dees this time around. Voxtrot came on around 12:15, and immediately started singing. Thats the nice thing I like about bands that arent really famous is that they don’t BS around and make you wait for them. Appropriately enough, they started off with the song ‘introduction’. I don’t think enough bands start off their albums with a song like ‘introducing the band’. Suede did it with Dog Man Star, and that’s pretty much my favorite album ever.
The rest of the setlist comprised of songs from the new album, as well as favorites like ‘the start of something’, ‘raised by wolves’ and ‘mothers, sisters, daughters and wives’. The crowd for most part was into it. As someone who was a big fan of their EPs, I was pleased with the show, and this was pretty much what I expected. The dude doesn’t have that great a stage presence, but that might just because of the bands I have seen in the previous few nites (pipettes, css, interpol).
Show: 4/5
Ps. funny story . because of sickness, one of our friends could not attend the show, so we ended up with one extra ticket. My friend tried to sell the ticket outside Sneaky Dees to two members of Voxtrot.
