Julian Casablancas warmed up for the release of the second album by the Voidz – they’ve dropped their frontman’s name as part of the band identity since their 2013 debut, Tyranny – with a wildly entertaining and enormously confused interview, during the course of which he asserted that the world had not appreciated Jimi Hendrix or David Bowie during their lifetimes, and that the internet had killed truth but people are also much more informed than they were in 2004. Virtue is just as confused, but rarely so entertaining. It is, apparently, a political album, but you’d only know that from searching the lyrics out online. Casablancas’s exquisite drawl – one of the most appealing sounds in rock – is at times here somewhere at the level of Leslie Phillips after an especially heavy night on the martinis, rendering whatever he’s actually singing into a warm and smoky “nyurrgh, rrrruuuurrrr, hrrrrrrr”. You tell ’em, Julian! Musically, Casablancas has said Virtue is “futuristic prison jazz”, whatever that’s supposed to mean.
It’s certainly neither futuristic nor jazz; if anything it’s a less finessed version of the way 80s mainstream pop has been twisted and reshaped by groups like the 1975. There are great moments: the opening Leave It in My Dreams is the kind of streamlined, insidiously melodic new wave that was once Casablancas’s default position; QYURRYUS – complete with scratching, screeching guitars, Auto-Tuned voices and a Middle Eastern modal melody – ought to be a mess, but is genuinely fantastic. When you can hear the words, things get more troublesome: Think Before You Drink is an acoustic protest ballad of such horrific obviousness – in which 39-year-old Casablancas complains about the poison he was fed by teachers – that you want to check it’s not actually Reeves and Mortimer offering the world The Freewheelin’ Mulligan and O’Hare. There’s enough about Virtue to keep it interesting. There’s not enough to make it genuinely good.
