The Voidz - Virtue

Pitchfork 69

The second album from Julian Casablancas and his motley New York band is sludgy, psychedelic sesh that occasionally coheres into surprising moments of clarity and radiance.

The Guardian 60

(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.

The Guardian 20

(Cult Records/Columbia)

Julian Casablancas’ second album with the Voidz starts more promisingly than the bulk of Tyranny, their misfiring 2014 debut. Leave It in My Dreams is actually recognisable as coming from the man who wrote the deceptively lackadaisical-sounding songs the Strokes used to do so well. However, things swiftly unravel on recent single QYURRYUS, a horrendous mess of throbbing, glitchy electronica, heavily Autotuned vocals and no doubt meaningful spoken phrases buried deep in the mix. Remarkably, it’s not even the worst song here: whereas Atari Teenage Riot once made metal guitars bolted on to a demented beat seem genuinely exciting, Black Hole replaces their passion and energy with a bafflingly muffled production to create perhaps the worst song of 2018 to date.

Casablancas had promised an “eclectic record”, and he has certainly delivered on that score. But there can be a fine line between “eclectic” and “utterly incoherent”, and this falls a long way inside the wrong court. As with the debut, Virtue is a wildly self-indulgent affair, genres jarringly cobbled together with little thought as to the consequences (is he trying to sound like Robbie Williams on All Wordz Are Made Up?). It isn’t all terrible – Pink Ocean locks into an appealing groove; Think Before You Drink is tuneful enough, if an abomination lyrically. But even the biggest Strokes devotee will find precious little worth hearing here.