For singer/guitarist Ramesh Srivastava, there are distinct eras of Voxtrot, the band he fronts. The first he references centers around the band’s 2005 EP, Raised by Wolves, where he sings about his first major love and heartbreak. “To me, those songs are very clearly that and don’t really have much poetic diffusion,” he says on a recent video call. With the band’s self-titled album, released nearly 20 years ago now, Srivastava sang about the pressure he says he felt being in a group with a record deal and big opportunities before them. “It was a very challenging time, so I feel like that album is lyrically mostly about my psychology. It’s not really about other people,” he explains.
Emerging from Austin, Voxtrot’s first run coincided with the rise of music blogs, file-sharing and early social networks like Friendster and MySpace, what people now might fondly refer to as “the good internet.” The band gained a buzz online, as well as in traditional media, with the EPs leading towards their 2007 album. While a couple singles followed the debut full-length, Voxtrot split in 2010.
A 2022 reunion and successful tour led to recording Voxtrot’s recently-released full-length, Dreamers in Exile. In the 12 years that passed between the band’s first and second lives, plenty changed, including Srivastava’s lyrical approach. “Now, I feel that I try to talk a lot about my own experience, to talk about my experience, being gay and of mixed race and how weird it is to be that and be from Texas and how hard it is to be that anyway,” he says. “I try to talk about my unique human experience, but also constantly bringing in stories and references of people and works of art that inspire me.”
He adds, “I’m really into creating a world that is both deep and meaningful, but is also aesthetically enjoyable.”
The recording process for Dreamers in Exile differed from previous efforts given that all five band members don’t currently live in the same city. While Srivastava, drummer Matt Simon and bassist Jason Choris live near Austin, guitarist Mitch Calvert and keyboardist Jared van Fleet don’t. So, while they tried to record as much live as possible, the Austin-area members spent the last year or so of the process finishing the album together. “It was a much more experimental piecemeal process than we’ve done before,” says Srivastava.
The resulting album finds the band in fine form. There are plenty of fantastic moments on Dreamers in Exile, from the gentleness of “The Times” to the baroque pop of “Esprit de Cœur.” But, “Rock & Roll Jesus” comes as an unexpected standout, loaded with a ‘70s glam grit, but done in a way you might expect from an indie artist in the early 2000s, think “Boys Wanna Be Her” by Peaches or “Train” by Goldfrapp.
“Pieces of the melody had been lingering with me for a long time and I had never figured out how to work them into a song,” says Srivastava of “Rock & Roll Jesus.” It was also one that he worried might not go over with his bandmates, that it might be “too off-brand” for Voxtrot and not solely for its sound. “It’s just talking about this strange, insane world of celebrity culture and the deifying and tearing down, which, of course, has been heightened by the advent of social media,” he explains. “I guess, in terms of subject matter and in terms of the aggressive nature of the song, I was worried that Matt and Jason would think that it was stupid, but it came together really quickly.”
The ‘70s vibe was intentional and achieved with synths from the era as well as a vintage mic. “I will say that one thing I really love about it is that it’s a single vocal take, which we don’t do very often,” Srivastava adds. The song also taps into his interest in dance music. “I love dance music and I DJ and I love the era of electroclash, bands like ADULT. and Ladytron and stuff, so that whole instrumental section with all the synths, that what we were trying to emulate,” he says.
We start to name-drop artists and labels like Chicks on Speed and International Deejay Gigolo. “None of those artists making those records then, I would bet, were conceiving of themselves as hoping to be discovered to be famous, to assimilate into the mainstream,” Srivastava surmises. “They’re truly underground and, for that reason, they get to be so tongue-in-cheek.”
Srivastava says he thinks about that music, and the humor in it, often. “That’s my favorite era of dance music,” he says. Since then, he surmises, the vibe of dance music has changed. “Everyone is aware of being looked at all the time and everybody wants to be looked at all the time, so it changes the nature of what’s produced,” he says.
At that point in the early 2000s, Srivastava was living in Glasgow. “I got really into dance music there and just going to those clubs where they were playing record after record that I never heard, but that mind was so blown by,” he says. “Sometimes I would go up to the DJ booth and be like, ‘What is this?’ But, most of the time, no, I was just lost in it and I had no anxiety about not knowing what it was or needing to know what it was. It was just complete immersion and it’s so hard to get that complete immersion now.”
But, Voxtrot gets at a similar type of immersion on Dreamers in Exile. It’s not the same as today’s calculated “immersive experiences.” It’s the feeling that you might recall from the days before we succumbed to brainrot, when we could tune into a song for three or four minutes before a restless finger taps the phone screen. You pay attention because, during the course of one song, the band introduces new production elements or the lyrics take a turn that you didn’t predict. Whether you’re talking about the lyrics, instrumentation or production, these are songs that don’t stay in one place and can’t quite be reduced to seconds-long social media clips.
“I will say that I have had people I work with in various capacities suggest, here’s a breakdown of what works the best on a streaming service, for example and what’s the average length of time that somebody listens to something, etc.,” says Srivastava. “It’s not that I think that all those people are wrong or stupid, because I’m sure the thing that they’re saying is actually a fact.”
Still, playing to the platform’s needs isn’t Srivastava’s style. “I think that the most successful stuff is stuff that people make authentically,” he says. “Decade over decade, the stuff that is actually the most successful, in movies and in music, is people that do not worry about the formula.”
Dreamers in Exile by Voxtrot is available now. The band launches their latest tour in Phoenix on March 25 and plays Pacific Electric in Los Angeles on Thursday, March 26.
Liz O. is an L.A.-based writer and DJ. Follow on Instagram or sign up for the weekly, Beatique newsletter for updates on new stories and gigs.
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