Listen Well: voxtrot by voxtrot (2007)

Today I’m starting a new blog series that I’m calling “listen well,” where I recommend an album to a BTS member on their birthday. It just so happened that the eldest member is up first; so, happy 31st birthday, Kim Seokjin!

December 4th
Kim Seokjin, born 1992
Album recommendation: Voxtrox by Voxtrot, released May 22, 2007.

The first time I looked at Jin’s “Favorite Tracks” Spotify playlist, I was overcome by a surprisingly emotional sense of deep understanding: despite the fact that he’s a global superstar from the other side of the world, Kim Seokjin and I are not so different. We both love Taylor Swift’s 2020 magnum opus folklore, for example, but perhaps more importantly we were both Going Through Some Shit in the early aughts that caused us to imprint on Trent Reznor and take up the guitar. Of course, Jin is now singing the ballad he co-wrote with Chris Martin in stadiums, while I’m writing this blog, but I think the fact that we can both still admit that “Iris” is a top-tier banger means our tastes haven’t diverged as much as our life paths. 

While I’m well aware that these recommendations won’t actually reach the members of BTS, I do hope that they bring some attention to albums from either lesser-known artists or lesser-known efforts from bigger names. For this first installment, I figured the vast and oft-forgotten DIY indie rock wave that followed in the wake of bands that broke mainstream — like The Goo Goo Dolls and The Fray — deserved some attention. 

In his 2021 profile of the band for Rolling Stone, Brian Hiatt wrote that BTS have a “casually non-toxic, skin-care-intensive form of masculinity,” and in the accompanying interview, RM agreed that BTS “reject[s] rigid conceptions of masculinity.” Among fans, Jin in particular is well-known for his love of pink and all things cute, embracing an incredibly soft aesthetic; despite his penchant for stadium rock, his off-duty fashion is more often oversized pastel athleisure than leather or ripped denim. His lyrics also reflect an openness about emotional pain — that is, emotional pain outside the realm of sex and romance — that isn’t often addressed by male pop artists.  Honesty about everyday struggles with depression and self-doubt has been a throughline in his music since his earliest solo song “Awake” (2016), where he sings about feelings of inadequacy and his desire to “still struggle and fight.” In his soulful 2020 single “Abyss,” Jin writes “Still, I remain with myself/My voice doesn't come out, I just circle around/That dark place that I wanted to be lost in.” 

So it’s fitting, I think, that I’ve chosen an album for Jin’s birthday that takes vulnerable, emotionally open masculinity as its central theme. Voxtrot, at this time still the only full studio release by the band of the same name, was received with some trepidation when it first arrived back in 2007. Before its release, Voxtrot had built an almost impossible-to-sustain hype around their three EPs, Raised by Wolves (2005), Mothers, Sisters, Daughters & Wives (2006), and Your Biggest Fan (2006), so it’s perhaps not surprising that outlets like Pitchfork were lukewarm on the sprawling 11-track epic that is Voxtrot. Pitchfork’s Eric Harvey wrote at the time that the album was “too ambitious,” which pretty much sums up the critical consensus in 2007. But I was not a critic in 2007; I was a teenager with green hair who loved Belle & Sebastian, and everything Voxtrot released was gold to me. Musically, their sound hit right where I lived: clearly influenced by Belle & Sebastian’s Cool Britannia chamber-folk, but with a slightly harder edge. Needless to say, this album was on heavy rotation for me throughout my undergraduate years. I even saw Voxtrot live on their last tour in 2010. All that said – is Voxtrot the album a time-and-space-transcending masterpiece? Probably not. But it does hold up, both as a collection of very good rock songs, and as a painfully accurate crystallization of exactly what it felt like to be a marginalized young adult in the late aughts.

Race and sexuality were not lyrically explicit in their music, but bandleader Ramesh Srivastava’s mere existence in the overwhelmingly white, straight world of indie rock was treated as a bit of a curiosity by the press during the band’s heyday. The Dallas Voice identified the singer as gay in a SXSW roundup in 2007, but later that year called that assertion “unsubstantiated.” Since then, Srivastava has slowly opened up about his sexuality, singing “don’t worry boy, it’s just your queer life,” on a 2009 Voxtrot single, and in 2020 “officially” confirming his queerness in an Instagram post. In 2022, Srivastava told OutSmart magazine that throughout his career he “thought of [himself] as totally out of the closet,” but that he “feared that the world was homophobic” and thus “used general pronouns” in his songs.

Though he may have feared a public outing back in 2007, Srivastava’s lyrical and musical contribution to Voxtrot’s artistic identity was still characterized by radical vulnerability. Throughout the album, the singer often sounds on the verge of a sob, imbuing even lines like “cheer me up/I’m a miserable fuck” with soul-searing pathos. Among the pop-punk trappings of distorted guitars, driving drums, and violent imagery, his throbbing tenor delivers subversion after subversion. In the first verse of “Brother in Conflict,” a tight hard-rock anthem, Srivastava declares:

I wanna, I wanna drown you in a pool of blood
And I wanna, I wanna fix you like a hawk
I never had guts, no thanks, I’m a velvet touch
Soft money, soft looks, soft, oh till you stop

The swift pivot from “I wanna drown you in a pool of blood” to “I’m a velvet touch” is a microcosm of the whole album, from the moody nostalgia of “Introduction” to the surprisingly triumphant “Blood Red Blood.” These bookend tracks share lyrical and musical material, tying the album together thematically; Srivastava reminisces about youth on “Introduction” (“Remember we ran through ugly streets/We made our rules and then broke them first/It felt like we were running all the time”) and immortality on “Blood Red Blood” (“Picture me, how will you picture me when I am dead?/All fast and free, building up fantasy blocks in my head/My legacy, do these things dissipate in the years unread?”), all while baring the softest – and sometimes darkest – parts of himself.

To return to the damning-with-faint-praise Pitchfork review, which in 2007 carried a perhaps disproportionate weight with Voxtrot’s target audience, Harvey is particularly hard on Srivastava’s voice, writing that “it struggles to keep up with harder numbers like ‘Brother in Conflict’ or the cluttered closer ‘Blood Red Blood,’ finding itself buried in the mix.” I’d argue that this is a feature, not a bug. Yes, he does sometimes seem pushed beyond comfort, but that’s perfectly in line with the album’s narrative of a “sensitive man” (to quote lead single “Firecracker”) confronting his deepest anxieties.

After 2007, Voxtrot only released a few more singles before officially breaking up in 2010. Srivastava has pursued a solo career, putting out studio albums under the mononym Ramesh in 2014 and 2022. Also in 2022, Voxtrot embarked on a reunion tour, followed by two new singles in 2023. The most recent of the two, “New World Romance,” promises a newly liberated Voxtrot, confident in their queer roots, poetically matured, but still unflinchingly vulnerable. Srivastava’s voice, honed to a compact, piercing tenor, demands that you listen as he sings the chorus

It’s a beautiful world, can I please stay in it?
Life it goes by in a New York minute
There’s wild roses still blooming in me 

You can find Voxtrot’s new double single “New World Romance”/“Another Fire” and their 2007 album Voxtrot on Bandcamp and all streaming services.