Julian Casablancas is clearly playing an unconventional game tonight. With the adored-but-troubled Strokes erratically ploughing their New York new-wave furrow to diminishing cultural returns and the straightforward synthpop variation of his 2009 debut solo album Phrazes for the Young failing to revive his standing as indie rock’s thrift-store saviour, he’s tossed in the pop towel, started a loss-leading record label called Cult to release his friends’ crankiest basement tapes and made his own Jazz Oddyssey.
His latest project is the Voidz, whose debut album Tyranny, in stark contrast to the directness of the Strokes, is a sprawling hour of malformed, politically-charged madcap future rock. The band certainly look interesting: a gang of 23rd century neo-punks on day-release from The Warriors who open their set with a scuzzed-up Daft Punk cover beneath a backdrop of a chessboard full of pawns. Unfortunately, the drug that will make it sound brilliant hasn’t been invented yet and, live, the obscure anti-war and anti-capitalist statements of Business Dog and Father Electricity are rendered incomprehensible by Julian howling and crooning into what sounds like a corroded mic. So we’re left with the clatter: disjointed Afrobeat, Martian calypsos, Twilight Zone UFO noises, dislocated arena riffs and chunks of frenzied math metal coagulate into an elegantly wrecked backing to Casablancas’ islands of rusted melodies. The whole thing resembles Animal Collective, the Cramps, the Flaming Lips, Slayer and, yes, the Strokes – all playing simultaneously.
There’s an air of mischief and sabotage to the Voidz – even when they tackle the Strokes’ Ize of the World, it’s pumped with steroidal fuzz and Julian covers guitarist Amir Yaghami’s eyes, mid-solo. Yet, after the 11-minute Human Sadness has meandered from mangled ballad to demented space-rock epic, it’s the familiar tunes that provide much-needed coherence: River of Brakelights, from Phrazes for the Young, is soaring pop relief and Julian’s stripped down solo take on the Strokes’ I’ll Try Anything Once sets a rather wonky night right.
