Voxtrot – “Mothers, Sisters, Daughters & Wives” b/w “Rise Up In The Dirt” – Full Time Hobby Records

At Macrock in 2005 I happened into seeing Voxtrot and they were unbelievably amazing. A band that I knew nothing about completely blew away every other band that I had driven to middle-of-nowhere Virginia to see (Cloak Dagger was sick though). They totally played a good time slot on a Friday, and I remember their set more than any other band that weekend (including Fucked Up-with-a-guy-bass-player).

“Mothers, Sisters, Daughters & Wives” is by far the best Voxtrot song. Throughout the last couple of years I’ve managed to track down all of the Voxtrot records, but after listening through all of them, I purged the majority of the records that were “just okay”. The LP, and this single are miles above everything else they put out, and honestly better than almost everything else that Pitchfork raved about from 2005-2007. While “Rise Up” is a solid song, “Mothers…” is one of the best twee songs from the last 10 years. It’s unstoppably good. The slap-back guitar chops at the beginning, straight into a haunting organ, and the main riff kicking in over Ramesh Srivastava’s vocals: it’s damn near a perfect song. If you’re into this kind of music, it’s hard not to get chills listening to this song.
Voxtrot seemed like they were about to be THE band of the mid-2000’s, and then after an LP their hype suddenly died. I don’t know if they had a bad publicist or if the rabid media beast that was indie-rock-press found another band to praise, but it’s a shame that they didn’t end up being Arcade Fire-famous. Fortunately for any reader of this blog, a bunch of Voxtrot records have started showing up in cheap bins. During the much-written-about Academy Records purge I re-bought the “Firecracker EP” and won’t be giving this away.