Nobody is shedding too many tears over last week's news that the Austin indie-pop band Voxtrot is calling it quits, but the group deserves at least a brief moment of silence.
Voxtrot was torn between two eras. Like the 1980s jangle-pop bands they idolized, they released their early songs through 7-inch singles and EPs. That old-fashioned approach earned them the attention of a very modern hype machine. Around the time Voxtrot released its 2005/2006 EPs Raised by Wolves and Mothers, Sisters, Daughters & Wives, mp3 blogs were emerging as a major force in critical circles, and they took a particular liking to Voxtrot. The band was never able to manage the pressure that came with all that sudden attention. Having already exhausted their best tricks on their EPs, the band was forced to switch up their sound for their 2007 debut album. The resulting product was overreaching and, ironically for a self-titled album, didn't sound much like the band. Of course, by that time most of their supporters weren't listening anymore, anyway.
That accelerated career trajectory is now commonplace--buzz bands routinely rise and fall before they even finish an album--but as one of the first victims of the backfiring, mp3-era hype machine, Voxtrot was truly, tragically blindsided. In a blog post announcing the band's break-up, singer Ramesh Srivastava describes the experience:
The career path of Voxtrot was truly one of long, simmering build, explosion, and almost instantaneous decay ... Whenever I read an interview in which a band claims they are going to return to the sound of their earlier, more popular work, a small part of me aches for them. It doesn't work like that--the popularity of the earlier work is based upon the sense of newness felt by the musicians at the time of creation. So, how to get back the newness…?
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Srivastava's whole blog post is worth reading, offering insight into how a musician copes with that "instantaneous decay." He writes that his resentment has faded over time, but he still clearly seems stunned by the experience.
