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The Voidz: Virtue review – Julian Casablancas growls but doesn't bite

(RCA)

Julian Casablancas warmed up for the release of the second album by the Voidz – they’ve dropped their frontman’s name as part of the band identity since their 2013 debut, Tyranny – with a wildly entertaining and enormously confused interview, during the course of which he asserted that the world had not appreciated Jimi Hendrix or David Bowie during their lifetimes, and that the internet had killed truth but people are also much more informed than they were in 2004. Virtue is just as confused, but rarely so entertaining. It is, apparently, a political album, but you’d only know that from searching the lyrics out online. Casablancas’s exquisite drawl – one of the most appealing sounds in rock – is at times here somewhere at the level of Leslie Phillips after an especially heavy night on the martinis, rendering whatever he’s actually singing into a warm and smoky “nyurrgh, rrrruuuurrrr, hrrrrrrr”. You tell ’em, Julian! Musically, Casablancas has said Virtue is “futuristic prison jazz”, whatever that’s supposed to mean.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2pSr08k

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