eVoid

eVoid’s Graffiti Lounge. Dave Matthews meets Vampire Weekend for grownups. A (relatively) new album from 80s SA greats, all grown up.

eVoid Graffiti Lounge

Imagine that, like one of our young music writers here, you’ve never heard of eVoid, and you think they’re a brand new band that have sprung fully formed from the expat community in the UK. What will you hear? You’ll hear a glorious blend of South African sounds and reflective lyrics, sometimes fun, sometimes intriguing, and you might think – hey! It’s kind of Dave Matthews meets Vampire Weekend for grownups. And you’ll start dancing around in circles singing “Woza people now, mix it up!”

But if you’re part of the older market, the children of the 80s who used to gyrate to “Taximan” and “Shadows”, you’ll hear Paul Simon, Bright Blue, a little bit of Robin Auld and a hell of a lot of eVoid. The great thing is that eVoid sound totally on the money for decade One of the 21st century. They’ve swapped new wave for new age, but in a totally cool kind of way that has nothing to do with dream catchers and everything to do with environmentalism and political critique.

A song like “iKologi” could have been irritating, in that lactose-intolerant save the earth kind of way, but it isn’t. It’s beautiful and evocative, and features the reflective guitar of Erick Windrich, that perfectly complements the haunting vocals of, I assume, his brother Lucien. The pre-release cd I have doesn’t have liner notes, and I’m deliberately not listening to the eVoid back catalogue, which as far as I know is only two releases anyway.

“Not in my name,” a litany of evils of the Iraq war, and a tribute to the anti-war demos, teeters on the edge of preciousness, but manages to sustain a certain raw honesty that saves it. Co-incidentally, I’m listening to the CSNY “Déjà vu live”, and Neil Young’s “Living with War” sounds painfully turgid by comparison. As befits an expat band, there are a lot of lyrics about blue skies, but that’s cool.

“Graffiti Lounge” arrived on my desk at the same time as a loan convertible arrived in my garage, so I’m spent a week blasting out eVoid and getting some rays. So it all made sense, especially the rousing “Language of Love”, which gets a groove on that’ll keep you bouncing happily, no matter what weather you’re enduring.

(First published on Channel24)