- It’s pleasing to realise that, as the world changes slowly but surely into something I don’t recognise and am increasingly afraid of, the kids are still getting down to songs about getting smashed, bitchy girls, stupid conformists or just having a mouth that tastes like cigarettes. It’s almost unbelievable just how much it sounds like it did nearly thirty years ago, when I first started thrashing about in my bedroom to jams on my walkman. Well it does sound that way if the band you're talking about is Voiid.
If you were in any doubt about who inspires the skungy sound of Voiid, you can clear that up by looking at their t-shirts. I clocked Anji Greenwood (on vocals), Kate McGuire (on lead guitar), Antonia Hickey (on bass) and Jasmine Cannon (on the drums) repping hard for the Seattle sound: Alice In Chains, Nirvana, Melvins; what, no L7? Well, they weren’t wearing it there, but I hear someone in the band owns a much-loved Babes In Toyland t-shirt, so that’s alright.
It’s something I’d been wondering about because, deliberately or not, the no-bullshit sound the girls thunder out is actually a little bit more complex than you might expect from a quartet bellowing garage-punk ditties about hangovers. The debts to grunge are obvious, but for all that this is riot-grrrl reborn, it’s a few other things as well. Like not a few bands of that era you can also draw a direct line from Voiid to The Ramones, punching pleasant, goofy, grinning rays of sunshine through the thick fuzz. Last is the soupy reverb that marinates all of Voiid’s music. It’s definitely not their least important quality, in fact, think it may be the thing which really hooks me on Voiid.
The band didn’t go quite as hard on their 2017 EP, the delightfully titled Pussy Oriented and there you could hear echoes of bands like Throwing Muses, Belly or even Mazzy Star. Today Voiid have amped the power that much higher and what was once a dusting of dream pop is more like a wave of shoegaze, or perhaps it’s the deserty, stoner of Kyuss or just that sludgy Melvins sound taking over.
Thing is, there’s no shortage of bands, especially from up Brissie way, that want to rock out like it was 1994, but Voiid convince me more than most of them. I get the feeling that there’s not many records of that era they haven’t listened to and it’s less like they walk the walk and more like they live the sound. It explains why every time I twitch my ear in their direction I get a nostalgic flash of The Muffs, a sleazy reminiscence of Hole or even a cheeky pop throwback to Veruca Salt. It’s quite strange to take a walk down memory lane with a band that weren’t alive at the time, but probably remember it better than I do.
- Chris Cobcroft.