Voxtrot

For all the jangly guitars and moody swoon, Voxtrot sounds like it hails from Britain, not Austin. Perhaps it's those three years frontman Ramesh Srivastava spent studying in Scotland. Originally, he was a student at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, but he quit because he didn't like submitting his passion to a formal education. Srivastava, however, kept jamming with his friends back in Texas during visits from Glasgow, where he was attending school. And eventually, he gave up his plans to become a teacher and returned home to pursue the band.

Voxtrot's debut EP, Raised by Wolves, sounds like a blend of the Smiths and Belle & Sebastian. The music's swooning warmth is the ideal bed for the crooning romantic in Srivastava, even though he just as often demonstrates a cutting wit: "I used to be your biggest fan/And now I find that you are slipping in my estimation," he sings on the title track of Voxtrot's Your Biggest Fan EP. The group's self-titled debut LP features a more sedate tone driven by dancier, darkwave rhythms and spiky post-punk guitars that have been sanded down into an ersatz chamber rock.