Review Summary: Post-Punk in name only.
It seems as though modern post-punk revivalism epoch has been continuously positioned to disillusion general public’s (or rather whoever pays attention to it) hopes for it ever becoming as profoundly grand and life-changing as the genre’s preceding period. Of course, it would have been foolish to assume that it ever had a chance, but it was reasonable to hope that it has the potential to grow in a certain level of popularity among those once prominent in the golden age of the genre. I will be perfectly honest, projects like Vox Low gradually drain that hope in me too.
It has all the shape of darkwave, it has all the brooding atmosphere of a perfectly acceptable post-punk album, it has the popping bass of one as well, yet it doesn’t have merely anything of substance. Apart from occasional tonal changes in the instrumentation, like on the song “You Are a Slave”, it goes by like a placid wasteland offering nothing much to anyone willing to scavenge through. And that is odd, considering the fact that each song has the means of becoming striking and outstanding, had it just had any deeper instrumental layering or more memorable song-writing. Because it does show distant basis for those potential aspects (”Something is Wrong” or “Trapped on the Moon”), but never utilises them to their full potential.
And at the end of the day, all you can lean on with this strange little miniature record is the occasional guitar wielding techniques the band uses, where it sounds vaguely psychedelic and mildly tangling. As unfortunate as it is, a hidden gem it is not. An odd rehash of what is distantly reminiscent of some of the more obscure underground pop-ups from back in the day, that it is.
