- William Klep, aka Voidhood is an unusual beast, some kind of marine creature I guess, if all the watery motifs and metaphors on his debut EP, Sleeping With The Fishes are to be believed. Quite earnestly the record wrestles with psycho-social and artistic issues through the central imagery of swimming, or often sinking in music, in making a life, or simply drowning in Klep’s own mind. There’s a lot that’s high-concept, even quite nerdy here in these unflinchingly honest self-examinations, the flowery poetry and the regular HP Lovecraft references. We’ll get to all that, but it’s not what hits you first. Voidhood channels an odd but strangely obvious set of influences. The result made me want to chuckle, even snigger, but, actually, this really works.
The sparse, loping guitar and especially the basslines are all live, but often function like loops, giving the sound a strangely dual quality: halfway between funky alt-rock and hiphop. If it didn’t already sound like King Krule (it does), Klep’s deliciously deep and lyrical voice completes the impression. Already though there’s something else there: the semi-spoken-word / semi-rapped delivery is reminiscent of someone, I had to think a while to work out who. The fantastical lyrics, which, with his voice, could easily be a Nick Cave nightmare (not the guy I was trying to think of) are another hallmark, like on opener Gillotine: “I heard in lower Manhattan they are growing gills / New York’s the new Atlantis; a modern R’lyeh / And one day the oceans gonna be our tomb.” They proceed to a ragged bellow: “The youths are screaming at the great white shark / Who holds dominion over the great white states” and then you realise this sounds just like Bone Machine era Tom Waits. Just for good measure the EP folds in the jazziness of Krule and Waits and aims to tap into the spirit of Charles Mingus, even if it isn’t quite as complexly noodly as that.
Unlike Krule, I never thought of Waits as ‘urban’, but it’s one of Voidhood’s most significant successes that he pushes right over the line into hiphop thanks to his formidable skills as a rapper which become evident as the EP progresses, see tracks like Beams or Hyde for evidence. It’s like Charlie 2na if he decided to put on gothic eyeliner.
The bizarre concoction of intense self-examination, xenomorphs, extremely white poetry, talented MCing, conscious political themes and ancient Cthulu gods make me feel a little awkward. If I’m honest it’s because I have all of those things jumbling around in my head and hearing them all here is like having the contents of my mind spewed up on a record for everyone to say, “how strangely geeky is that?” Sleeping With The Fishes feels like a guilty pleasure, but that doesn’t stop it being a great pleasure. Much more talented than any mere human, you’ll want to watch out for the freakish fishman that’s just washed up on our shores.
- Chris Cobcroft.