I have to admit it, I have never been a Strokes fan, I like a few songs like anybody else, but this Julian Casablancas and the Voidz thing is a different adventure. I saw them at the FYF fest, while the Strokes were also headlining, and I had never seen so many Strokes t-shirt worn at the same place at the same time. There was more love for the famous New York band than for any other band playing during the two-day festival. Thursday night was a bit similar, Strokes’ fans had lined up outside the theater long before the doors had opened and everyone but me was wearing a Strokes-Voidz theme shirt! People in the street were even trying to sell me some of their home-made JC+the Voidz shirts whereas this is usually happening after the show… No doubt about it, the FYF Julian fan club had gathered in a large herd.
The surprising opener was Ariel Pink, and I say surprising because I don’t necessarily see the musical connection, but why not? After all, Pink is an original (just like Julian and this new band) and has an upcoming album to promote, the already famous ‘Pom Pom’. However, I always find this little mermaid hard to follow live, and for a few songs I had no idea of what was going on. Wearing some girlie shorts, tights, glittery high heels and suspenders, he was playing with his long blonde hair constantly while distorting his voice, and the result was half rock show, half joke, half karaoke session, half provocation number, sung by a half man, half female, half beast, I know that’s way too many halves but Ariel is weird and did I say he had suspenders? His voice was resonating too much in the theater, not his fault, and I could not understand a word of what he was saying, although I heard a guy shouting behind me, ‘My favorite song is the last song!’… ouch! However, after some rare parts making little sense and provocative disco dances, there was a sudden 70s-like melody, some hushed vocals and it was quite enjoyable… but that’s the moment that someone chose to puke two feet away from me, and I got a bit distracted by… the horrible smell. However, Ariel was now crooning, and I could actually hear his voice. He has become a throat singer, auditioning for one of these voice shows… It could have been this new song of his, ‘Picture me Gone’, and it was actually good, despite the strong detergent smell, now that they were cleaning the carpet! Ariel Pink you are some crazy changing-dodging fish…
But the moment was almost there, the moment for all these girls in love with pretty-face Julian, he was almost there. The young girl on my left may have contributed a lot to my future tinnitus with all these heartfelt screamed ‘I love you Julian’, and her boyfriend got to participate too! But it didn’t took long for Julian to give them some love back, During the first song, ‘Xerox’, he was already in the middle of the packed crowd in the pit for the immense pleasure of fans who were able to touch him! Was this announcing a crazy show? Not exactly, it was the only eccentricity of the evening, Julian stayed on stage for the rest of the show…. don’t people usually keep this treat for the end? But Julian doesn’t do anything like everybody else.
After the dissonance of the first song, it was the hard and infectious rhythms of ‘Father Electricity’, a sort of boogie dance with Julian almost constantly bent, his face hidden by his two hands grapping the mic. I was curious how he and his five musicians would be able to reproduce this complicated layered sound and it worked for most of it, although it helped a lot that I had listened to these songs many times before. The Strokes had some true glory days, everyone know some of their catchy songs by heart – and of course I am talking about the old ones, not the ones they produced after their return in 2011 – but you can’t say Julian Casablancas’ new album was a success, ‘Tyranny’ debuted at nº39 on the Billboard 200 and disappeared from the charts the next week. This did stop me to like these songs, which, strangely (or not) were taking an exotic dance turn, building a noisy experimental punk party haunted by Julian’s nasal vocals. They raised hell during a terrifying ‘M.utually A.ssured D.estruction’, with metal-like riffs and red lights. I was still barely able to see Julian’s pretty face but all the girls were extremely excited to even breathe the same air than him… Did he really say ‘I love dirty bitches’, last night? I couldn’t clearly hear, the blonde girl continued to destroy my eardrums… Then came the epic, heartbreaking, out-of-this-world-melancholia ‘Human Sadness’ which sounds like a complete reinvention of what Casablancas has even done or the creation of a new genre by itself. It was violent, complex and raging, and from my spot, Julian Casablancas looked like a romantic hero building his own hell with delight. ‘Where No Eagles Fly’ and its awesome bass line became a raging freak-out dance, and all these hard-to-redo-live songs (at least this is what I thought) were taking flesh with all these intricate layers. If the mood was quite dark, it became sunnier when they covered the Strokes, and they simply had to! During the whole show, I thought that many of these people were here because of the Strokes frontman’s presence not because of a genuine love for the new material. The cheerful reception done to ‘Ize of the World’ tends to let me think I was right, and it was even more obvious during ‘I’ll Try Anything Once’ that Julian sang during the encore; everyone knew the words, everyone cheered before he had even finished the song and everyone certainly owns an iPhone.
They almost played all the new songs but also did a Daft Punk cover, ‘Instant Crush’, announced by Julian as ‘risky time’, bringing a bit of funky disco dance, while ‘Dare I Care’ and its semi-middle-eastern beats brought us into a more chaotic journey with convoluted detours… I hadn’t noticed it before but a mosh pit was even raging during ‘Johan Von Bronx’.
Sure there is a lot going on during these dense, furious and thorny songs, there are complicated and deep emotions emerging, but this is certainly not for everyone… Still, you have to admire Julian Casablancas who could have comfortably continued to sing The Strokes’ old hits for the rest of his days. Instead, he dropped this 11-minute ‘Human Sadness’ as the first single of ‘Tyranny’ as if there was some hope for a commercial success or radio airplay? On Thursday night, I got the impression that most of the girls, almost oblivious of the new music, were standing in the pit in the only hope to touch the Strokes frontman, I was standing there totally oblivious of the Strokes’ aura, just enjoying Julian’s Tyranny.
Setlist
Xerox
Father Electricity
M.utually A.ssured D.estruction
Human Sadness
Where No Eagles Fly
Ize of the World (The Strokes cover)
Crunch Punch
Business Dog
River of Brakelights
Instant Crush (Daft Punk cover)
Dare I Care
Encore
I’ll Try Anything Once (The Strokes cover)
Johan Von Bronx
