At one point on The Voidest, were led somewhere very murky and dangerous. We are there for the occasion of dragging the water, looking for a body. Its not an abnormal place that Los Angeles rocker Imaad Wasif takes us. The thin-as-a-toothpick Wasif might as well be one of those cinematic, small town deputies, commenting in a deadpan, matter-of-fact way that hes seen a lot of things in his days, but never in his life has he seen a sight quite so grim or puzzling, as he leads up to the backwaters that could tell tales. Hed be dressed differently though, not in a tan or military-issued green troopers jacket, but in tight denim and puffy, flowery shirts. Hed talk coolly, as if he were half-asleep but then hed be prone to a wolf howl here or there to get the gravity of the situation across more effectively. Hed frighten you for a second and then tuck back into a rumbling storm cloud thats not necessarily acting like one yet, YET. Hell force you into an unsettling anxiety that demands a clamminess and a worried brow. Wasif makes a haunting and drilling kind of psychedelic rock and roll that comes at you like a slithering serpent or a stalking big cat and then it bursts in the blink of an eye and gets whatever its hunting in its clutches. He sings, I never tried to escape the rapture, and it seems to be a line that provides the jumping off point for his efforts, this fearless willingness to draw piping hot bath waters and then seeing how long he can sit in them, taking that pain and making it bleed into his skin to where he can really process it. What he does with it is he turns it into a cavernous outpouring of cracking skies and booming anthems for those who feel that the seeds of the ominous end have been planted and the only question is when theyre start sprouting and bearing fruit. The devils on the loose again, in the country, he sings at one point on The Voidist and its perhaps something that Wasif thinks about and believes to be somewhat true. Whos to say hes wrong? Then again, he admits elsewhere on the record that, As far as I can see, these visions are in me, meaning that maybe what he has to worry about and what we have to worry about are two very different things.