In Strokes lore, a fan favorite is the early demo version of “You Only Live Once,” titled “I’ll Try Anything Once,” released as a B-side to the “Heart in a Cage” single in 2006. The demo version is a piano ballad, with frontman Julian Casablancas singing drastically different lyrics than the rendition that would open the Strokes’ third album, “First Impressions of Earth.”
“There is a time when we all fail,” Casablancas sings on “I’ll Try Anything Once,” “Some people take it pretty well / Some take it all out on themselves / Some they just take it out on friends.”
Failure, of course, is relative. It’s hard to see much failure when Julian Casablancas + The Voidz – his new solo project that finds him leading five backing misfits through sprawling, loosely structured noisy punk experiments – sells out local haunt the Observatory on a Wednesday.
It’s hard to see failure when fans line up in the early afternoon for a good spot at the show, when they scream enthusiastically at the beginning of each song, whether they actually know them or not. It’s hard to see failure when they leave smiling after a little more than an hour of music, still exhilarated from Casablancas’ energetic and gracious set.
“Humbled,” Casablancas would say to sum up the night in one word, before sending them off on the night’s best original song, the jammed-out “Dare I Care.”
But the approval of his fans doesn’t detract from what Casablancas may realize is a failure. His September release with The Voidz, “Tyranny,” debuted at No. 39 on the Billboard 200, and fell off the chart the next week. Its lead single, the 10-minute-plus “Human Sadness,” intrigued music fans briefly upon its release, and saw one of the biggest reactions on this night coming early in the set, but the legs for a single of that length proved to be nonexistent.
And Wednesday night, the Voidz didn’t pass the ear test either, or the sight test for that matter. The band, to borrow a Strokes title, chose the cover of darkness to play from, with floor lighting flashing toward the rafters, leaving Casablancas to appear as a shadow for most of the night.
Onstage, three old television monitors, no more than 13 inches in size, sat apart on the left, right, and middle of the stage. The middle displayed a changing display of colors and shapes. The right was just static. And the left appeared to be turned off.
Whether these incongruent visual displays were purposeful or accidental is anyone’s guess. Likewise, with the music it is hard to tell if its general abrasion, the refusal to give in to Casablancas’ melodic leanings and his tendency to turn even the most shifting rhythms into a catchy tune, is all on purpose or just the result of a punky appearance becoming a punk attitude.
But the patience of the more casual fans was rewarded late in the set. First, Casablancas and his new band played The Strokes’ “Ize of the World,” which was a perfect choice to fit in with The Voidz aesthetic. Then, to open the two-song encore, keyboardist Jeff Kite backed Casablancas for the night’s clear highlight, the piano ballad and Strokes B-side “I’ll Try Anything Once.”
Fans sang along, and Casablancas included all the songs quirky details, including the finger snapping and the closing declaration “one more time,” which never comes to fruition. “You guys sing it better than I do,” Casablancas said, but it wasn’t true.
It was an appreciative move from a classy rocker reaching his middle career with a sort of discomfort, with a desire to spread his wings that should be expected. Maybe a smaller audience would be more appropriate for this type of music, but failure or success, Casablancas deserves the attention, and rewarded Santa Ana for it.
