Customer Reviews

Copacetic

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Did you ever know a band which was realtively obsure, but really, really good? A band that was your little secret that you only shared with your closest friends, who in turn also fell in love with the band? And didn't it break your heart when the band broke up...just when they were getting ready to break out? Sadly, Velocity Girl will always be THAT band for me.

I was admitted to the small, yet close-knit family of Velocity Girl fans when I picked up 'Copacetic' on a whim in the spring of 1993. I knew nothing about the band, but I heard good things (a "buzz" if you will) about them, plus they had a cool name, and the record store clerk recommended them. It turns out that Velocity Girl was the BEST BAND that I just "happened" upon, and Copacetic ranks as my all-time best impulse buy. So it broke my heart when they broke up after their 3rd full album. Pity us.

'Copacetic' was released during the height of the Sub-Pop grunge movement in the early 90's, but Velocity Girl was really an alternative pop band masquerading as a grunge band. The raw, garage-band sound that was present on their first album made it particularly charming however. The styles are broken up into the noisy, static-filled guitar numbers which barely cover signer Sarah Shannon's delicate voice (such as "Pretty Sister" and my absolute favorite VG song "Catching Squirrels") & the light alternapop songs (like "Pop Loser" and "Audrey's Eyes") which would come to highlight their later albums.

I don't know how much longer their torch will burn and the band known as Velocity Girl will remain in people's memory. Perhaps in 10 years, a great artist will emerge and list Velocity Girl amongst their influences (such as Kurt Cobain did with the Raincoats) and somebody will cover "Zealous Hearts" and make this band a little bit well known beyond the song used in the Volkswagon ads. It would be a tragedy if I had never bought up this album. It will be even worse if all of the potential VG fans out there don't pick it up either.

I bought this record in 1993 when I was 13, that was thirteen years ago, and I still listen to it all the time. It's fuzzy, poppy, rough, loud, soft and beautiful. I still come to realize lyrics after all this time, and "Catching Squirrels" ranks as one of my favorite songs ever. People have compared it to Medicine or The Swirlies, but I honestly have never come across a record quite like it. Buy it.

this is one of my favorite albums made during the nineties. sarah shannon's voice is perfect for the hazy pop melodies, and although the album does get weaker towards the end it's still a great album. it's not as clean and produced as later albums 'simpatico' and 'gilded hearts and zealous stars' and that's what makes it such a perfect album - though i like those later albums, i wish velocity girl had explored the sound of this album more. people always compare them to bands like heavenly and tsunami, and that's ok - but personally they always kinda reminded me of the primitives and maybe lush at times.

if you like this album i recommend searching out their early 7" single 'warm/crawl'.

also, the previous reviewer is welcome to his/her opinion but "generic early 90s alternative" just doesn't seem appropriate as a description for this album - that description seems more for bands like live and collective soul. no offense meant to fans of those bands but hey...that's what they are. and mentioning nirvana in a velocity girl review is kinda weird unless it's to contrast velocity girl with most sub pop artists.

One thing about all those UK shoegaze bands from the early nineties: they tended to all sound like they'd been produced to infinity and back. I didn't mind that, necessarily, and there were exceptions (like Bristol's Flying Saucer Attack--a lot of that stuff home taped). Now don't get me wrong, I like the Slowdives and the Lushes and the Rides and the Chapterhouses, but it's kind of amazing how U.S. shoegaze (or "dreampop") acts tended to get perceived as merely redux, or derivative of the UK's mightier, mainly press-generated scene at the time. What I liked (and like) about VG's "Copacetic," (along with the Swirlies' "BlonderTongueAudioBaton" and the Lilys' "In the Presence of Nothing," to name a couple others) is that the songwriting tends to be stronger, there's less spacey-perfect production, overall there's more of an organic feel. In some ways more relatability. I'm not sure what I feel about VG's subsequent albums, but "Copacetic" is an absolute gem, not least because of those lo-fi production values...

Velocity Girl's Copacetic is a great album, but it's not for everybody. Archetypical of the low-fi shoe-gazer sound that was ripening to perfection in the early to middle nineties, this recording projects a spectrum of emotions through the lens of fuzzy, feral pop. As with scat, the vocals here are about sound, not a vehicle for poetic lyrics. In this case, the dreamy effect is achieved primarily through the mix.
"Here Comes", the album's 4th track, offers the moodiness characteristic of the genre and the era without sounding obligatory or plodding. "Living Well" and "A Chang" send-up an exuberant cacophony of voice, jangling guitars, and distortion, while "Audrey's Eyes" foreshadows the band's more polished sound that emerges in their best work, the album Simpatico.
This diamond-in-the-rough is exactly the kind of music you'd expect from a talented young band who were just beginning to realize that they had their world on a string. A must-have for fans of My Bloody Valentine or early Breeders.

I felt obligated to review this after seeing that this album was rated below Simpatico. What? I'm not going to give this album 5 stars. It's extremely good, but it's not perfect. But it's a joke that Simpatico is rated above this.

This album really is a shoegazing gem. An overlooked early 90's indie rock gem. Great hooks, nice fuzzy guitars, and good vocals. There's not a bad song on here, although A Chang, 57 Waltz, Candy Apples and Chasing Squirrels are my favorite tracks.

I've read some people slagging the production. Really. That's Bob Weston. The album was recorded NOT to sound like a Go Go's album. Mr. Weston came out of the Steve Albini school of engineering. While I can understand not liking the aesthetic, (which has been critized for the past 15+ years for putting the music, rather than the vocals forefront) I personally think it sounds great. So, even if you hate it, do keep in mind that the production is intentional. I think it's a very pretty, warm, lo-fi sound. Weston produced/engineered some of the legends of the early 90's indie scene, including Sebadoh, Polvo, Archers of Loaf, etc. Oh yeah, and Weston co-engineered In Utero with Albini. So I think the man knew what he was doing when he decided where to set the levels on this album.

Those great, fuzzed out guitars are front and center in the mix. While I wouldn't go so far as to say that the vocals are buried, they are not mixed like "Our Lips are Sealed."

And I would concur with the previous reviewer that Velocity Girl has never had any connection with "Grunge" whatsoever, apart from the fact that Sub Pop released the lp. If you want to draw stylistic comparison's you could look towards Unrest, who Velocity Girl donated a member to at one point, and to Superchunk. Although, the beautiful thing about Velocity Girl was that they didn't sound like anyone else. Well, until they recorded Simpatico and began making songs that sounded like lots of indie pop bands rather than an indie rawk band.

If you get this cd and enjoy it, I'd point you to another brilliant, but overlooked indie rock album, Blonder Tongue Audio Baton

While not as slickly produced or well sequenced as later VG releases, this album is often more satisfying. Offering a less poppy, more raw picture of the band than later works, Copacetic gives only a small hint of the trend in later albums towards more straightforward pop songcraft and, later on, the ocassional country influences. This is an album with a very DIY garage sound, with many songs having a surprising number of parallels to indie acts coming out of the UK at the time. Quite a few songs have the familiar early 90's "soft-loud-soft-loud" or "loud-soft-loud" structures, but do not sound as dated as most of the music employing that hallmark of the era. Like many british indie albums and a few American releases (Yo La Tengo's "Painful" being the greatest) of 1993, there is a terrific noisy waterfall of guitar noise and feedback riding atop everything in most of the songs, particularly in the majestic opening track (one of my favorites) and "Living Well" which sounds like My Bloody Valentine on happy pills covering Ned's Atomic Dustbin, to the woozy "A Chang" which, just like on an MBV release, "Living Well" flows directly into. The most enjoyable and hummable songs are on the more pop-punk-girl-vocal side, the best of which are "Crazy Town" and "Audrey's Eyes". These latter songs point the way to the equally good, and even more fun album to follow, Simpatico, which finds the band figuring out just how they want to sound. But oh, what fun it is to follow the band as they explore on Copacetic.

What a truly sensous listening experience. With the alternately fuzzy, noisy and jangly guitars all rather mixed together in melodic goo and the dreamy, unprecious soprano of Sara Shannon floating in and out of the hooks, what you have is a sound which virtually no bands explored up to this point of its original release...well, maybe American bands anyway. This sound coalesces into perfection into the unsung(pun intended) pop gem of "Living Well." That's not to say there aren't other moments as well--catch the hurt pop angst of "Crazy Town", "Copacetic" or the catchily funny "Pop Loser." While the slower numbers don't offer as much, they don't weigh the album down and actually offer a breather between the more uptempo and noiser tracks. It's a shame that the rest of their ouevre sounded more polished and unfuzzy. They could have been contenders.

This album came in the aftermath of the release of Nevermind, when every two cent garage band was suddenly getting signed by cheeseballs from the big record labels and getting airplay. Taken as a whole, its a fairly good album ,although uneven and with its share of filler. The sound can be best described as generic early 90's "alternative", but with beautiful vocals and a very pretty jangly sound, for lack of a better term. The first three songs, Pretty sister, Crazy Town, and Copacetic are fantastic and worth purchasing the CD for.

the mixing and sound quality on this album were horrific...definately covering up the vocals. i enjoyed a couple of songs on here, but mainly it was a noisy, messy album. i did enjoy their later stuff more. i also had the not so pleasurable experience of seeing them live in nyc quite a few years back and they were horrible, which was very dissapointing. but that was in the early 90s..they were still young. :)