Voigt a band with a message and an interesting new sound
By Taylor Gibbons
Skiff Staff

It doesn’t usually freeze in North Texas. However, when you’re headed to Denton in a Jeep with a canvas top and no heater on a cold night, it can feel pretty close to it. Burke Mills, seated opposite me behind the steering wheel, was wearing only a denim jacket, but he didn’t seem to notice the cold. He was far too busy telling me about his band.

That band’s name — Voigt — is one you may or may not know, which is only one of many things its members are looking to change.

“I remember in the early ‘90s, during the whole grunge movement, just being really disillusioned with the whole ‘woe is me’ attitude, and then after that everything became pop which wasn’t really saying anything,” he said. “But now I think the pendulum is swinging back the other way, and I think people are ready for music that’s really energetic and fun to listen to but that also is trying to say something.”

During a performance at Dusty’s in Denton, I was given a chance to hear just exactly what Mills is talking about. Voigt has been compared to groups ranging from grand old men of rock like the Rolling Stones and David Bowie to followers of the modern “garage” sound like the Strokes. And although no one comparison is entirely accurate, by the same token none are really unfair either. Voigt’s sound is vintage by design, but features a distinctly modern aspect that hearkens back to REM and a political consciousness that recalls U2.

They might draw a lot of their influence from rock’s past, but never let it be said that Voigt doesn’t think about the future.

They’ve been playing together for just more than a year, and already they’ve garnered a write up in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the attention of some local big-name bands and producers. The band said Clearchannel even offered to pick up one of their songs for rotation on one of it’s radio stations, but they declined.

Voigt may only have been playing for a year, but the band’s history goes back further than that. Four years ago, bedridden and alone in a hospital, Mills found relief in the music he heard playing on the radio.

“That’s when I first got the idea to form a band,” he said. “I was just lying there and thinking that I wanted to be able to make people feel like this. I think that’s one of the great things about music, you can reach people you’d never reach otherwise, even if you were, let’s say, a preacher or a politician. It‘s the backstage pass to the world.”

Band members say forming the band was something they just had to do.

“I remember the first thing Burke said to me about it was something along the lines of ‘If you died right now, what could you say you’d done,’ ” bassist Taylor Mills said. “And the idea of forming a band wasn’t really foremost in our minds, but we both had this will and desire to create, and really do something that we felt would make a difference.”

Since then, the band has followed a steady regimen of live performances and has turned a few heads in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. They’ll be rocking with their last show of the semester Friday at the Aardvark.

Taylor Gibbons