Story and photo by DCist Contributor Mehan Jayasuriya

Much like their indie pop forebears — the Smiths, Belle & Sebastian, the entire roster of Sarah Records — Austin act Voxtrot has a thing for self-contained singles. As a matter of fact, they’ve taken their own sweet time releasing a full length, opting instead for a series of CD-Rs, 7-inch singles and EPs over the course of the last four years. As with the aforementioned bands, this fixation with singles stems from an obsession with pre-British invasion pop and its accompanying fetish object, the 45. Physical singles might be a thing of the past but don’t underestimate the marketing potential of a good single in the age of the Internet: Voxtrot, for one, attained near-mythic status in the blogosphere on the strength of their early singles and managed to ride the wave of hype all the way to a high-profile record deal. With the buzz at an all-time high following the band’s third consecutive tour of duty at SXSW, it seemed like the stage was set for a breakthrough album. But alas, it just wasn’t meant to be: Voxtrot, the band’s self-titled debut, fails to live up to the hype.

Now, that’s not to say that Voxtrot is a bad album — it’s not. It does, however, find the band losing much of the momentum that they’ve managed to build up over the course of their last few releases. Admittedly, this doesn’t come as a complete surprise: Voxtrot came out of nowhere a few years back with two singles that were virtually perfect, B-sides and all. These early releases were full of tightly-wound pop gems, classically catchy melodies and disarming ballads; by comparison, the songs on Voxtrot often seem unfocused and the melodies never feel fully-formed. Normally, these sorts of flaws are to be expected from a band’s debut album. Voxtrot, however, had created the expectation that they would produce a classic record as effortlessly as they had produced classic singles. In that sense, Voxtrot’s early success as a so-called “blog band” has proven to be both a blessing and a curse.