Sampling soulfully and looping luridly are skill sets ascribed to the best of the indie bunch ONLY. A tender-loving touch is the one thing separating artists like Garrincha & The Stolen Elk (way to go: a band name so bad I’m not even curious about the origin; well maybe a little) from the bruits who seek to STRAngle and deFLOwer the mode of expression with endless pastiches and patterns without any thought to where they go, and why. It’s MADNESS. (Seriously, I’m getting scared of how important sampling is to both commercial and underground artists. It’s all going to psychedelic hell in a tub of goldfish crackers, and all I can do it grab a handful and chomp. Mmmm, cheese-blasted.)
Void, as you might have guessed by now, is full of sampledelic soul and lots of loops, but the duo of Davy Vu Bui and Matt Kretzmann do a lot more than just push buttons, and at times, like early on in Side A, when a slow-motion, cave-crushing choir — “Should I switch to 45? Oh god, what should I do?” — chants over the top of the smokestack, they damn-near sound like geniuses. At other intervals, they can be found piling on a bit, doing the Excepter thing with a yip here and a yap there.
Of particular interest are the harrowing chants that rise and slowly renege their place in the mix — the tugboat-whistle groans that blow up like a burp bubble then POP — and a long line of distractions, most of them wonderful, some of them less gratifying. Overall, the full-length perspective is chosen over immediate thrills. You don’t get any peacocking at all from G+SE, as they trade pistol-packing lazer-synths for pregnant pauses — literally, as Pregnant are my closest precedent — and groaning skeleton choirs. Then Wyoming wind and Arizona burnt-folk, then prog guitar diddling and toybox grinding, all the while an oscillation gaining a foothold overtop. Weird, wild stuff, etc.
I’m glad they stayed off the paved roads on this one. Void avoids all the main exits while whirling up a purple-pink stretch of cotton ear candy more obviously sweet than sweetly obvious. Suck it off yr fingers and just try to forget the taste.
More about: Garrincha & The Stolen Elk
