Perhaps as intense and captivating an agent of evocation as any of the verses are, there’s a magnetizing quality to the beat in GelaX’s “Voodoo” that immediately draws us closer when listening to the first half of the song and holds our attention for the duration of the second. It’s excessively aggressive and far too pulsating to keep the space between the vocal and the synth sane; if anything, the percussive element in this single and its music video was designed to be one of chaos and discord, giving the vocal in the mix something formidable – but not impossible – to contend with.
The video adds to the eccentricities already present in this composition, and I would even say that it makes the lyrical narrative at hand much darker than it would have been on its own. There’s something definitively gothic about the cosmetics of the music video for “Voodoo,” yet it’s able to be colorful in a modern way that seems to still coexist within the post-punk spectrum old school goth did. The electronic foundation makes it clubby, but this is indeed a dirge when you strip away all of the surface-level elements and examine what the song is made of emotionally.
Watch the video for “Voodoo” below
This groove is so immersive that I found myself listening to the track several times through just to appreciate the way it seems to propel every instrument in the mix forward. The synthetic componentry would have likely sounded too plastic next to the sexy lead vocal at the forefront of the spotlight had there not been a little extra moxie in the rhythm at a few key junctures in “Voodoo,” but in this instance, it’s able to preserve the theme of the music and impart something virtuous and entirely it’s own at the same time.
The bass is bigger than I would have gone with had I been in the producer’s chair, but I can see where it might have needed to be for GelaX to get the physicality out of this song that they’d originally hoped to. Giving a single some brawn indeed takes more than just an enormous bassline, but given the other aforementioned attributes in “Voodoo,” I don’t think this crew needed anything else to make the track a club-worthy piece of material. It’s not a complete work of conventionality, but there’s crossover appeal between the radio, the dancefloor, and the casual hipster playlist in this song.
Dreamonic is a fascinating listen and one that I recommend you check out if you haven’t already this summer, and personally I think that “Voodoo” is probably the most potent and identity-capturing song in its tracklist. This is GelaX being the left-field pop magicians they’re supposed to be, and though it might have a bit more complicated look than some might be prepared for, I don’t think it was made to satisfy fans of industry standards. Pop and its audience are in a new era, and responding to the demands of that era clearly matters to this band.
