Secret History: Velocity Girl's ¡Simpatico!
Our occasional series "Secret History" features profiles of classic D.C. albums as a way of looking back at the District's contributions to music over time. In this installment, we revisit Velocity Girl's ¡Simpatico! (Sub Pop, 1994).
Coalescing at the University of Maryland in the late '80s, Velocity Girl specialized in winningly sharp indie pop steeped in resonant major chord melodies and spry, agile rhythms, with a solid grounding in the unabashedly catchy style of bands associated with the UK's Postcard and New Zealand's Flying Nun labels, the semi-psychedelic nostalgia of Paisley Underground groups like the Rain Parade and Dream Syndicate, and the exhilarating pop perfection of the best New Wave acts. Focused and concise, the best Velocity Girl is some of the best indie rock D.C. – or any other city – can claim to have produced in the last 20 years.
Velocity Girl’s approach set them apart from the heavy, hard-charging, politicized postpunk common to D.C. in the '90s. Says guitarist Brian Nelson, “We found things like tunefulness, texture, and simple songcraft to be almost exotic because of their regional absence. We wanted to hear hollow body guitars feeding back open major chords through Fender amps.” Guitarist and vocalist Archie Moore adds, “There was almost no American pop-song oriented indie stuff to speak of [in D.C. at the time], so I'm pretty sure a lot of local rock bands and fans had no context for us, and regarded us early on as this goofy, cheery, sloppy group, and later as crassly commercial alternative wannabes.”
“I have an anecdote that sums up how I think the D.C. punk scene regarded us,” Moore continues. “It's from my friend Mike, who's in the metal band Darkest Hour. Before I met him, his band bought from [College Park music shop] Atomic Music a bass cabinet that had once belonged to Velocity Girl; the name was stenciled on the back. When they wanted to sell the cabinet back to Atomic, Atomic offered them $100. Mike joked, ‘But dude, this belonged to Velocity Girl.’ The Atomic dude joked back, ‘Okay, $50.’”
Stories like that one aside, Nelson thinks D.C.’s rich musical landscape allowed Velocity Girl space to fit in. “[Labels like] Slumberland, Simple Machines, Teenbeat, and DeSoto were all putting out records along side Dischord. That worked to everyone's benefit. Being in any city where there's such a strong interest in music, even if it's not stylistically the same as where we were coming from, is a plus.”
Initially emerging as a noisy, shoegazer-ish outfit cranking out what Moore describes as a “murky noise rock, a sorta half-assed Sonic Youth sound,” Velocity Girl promptly turned their attention to the sunnier side of the street, cleaning up their approach and emphasizing tunefulness over distortion. While the Bob Weston-produced debut LP, Copacetic, is an impressive opening gambit, it’s the follow-up, 1994’s ¡Simpatico!, that best displays Velocity Girl’s powers, 12 tracks of unerringly impressive indie pop packed into just under 35 minutes.
Like Copacetic, ¡Simpatico! was released on Sub Pop, a label then associated most closely with the very un-Velocity Girl grunge sound.
Being with Sub Pop "was good for us, because we could exhale and not worry about money so much. Up until this time we were all pretty broke,” said drummer Jim Spellman. Adds Moore: “We had never considered Velocity Girl to be anything but a hobby until we unexpectedly started getting noticed by a few labels. Until then, we had always assumed that we would eventually record one band-financed album for Slumberland, and that would be it.”
"I do think Sub Pop may have changed our outlook on what was possible," says Nelson. "With a bigger label I think we started to feel like this might be something we could keep doing and even earn some sort of living at, while also being a safe place for us to grow and develop.” Adds bassist Kelly Young, “I'm sure we taught the folks at Sub Pop a lesson about throwing away money on people like us.”
Signing to Sub Pop meant that the band could spend more time and energy in the studio honing their technique, working with producers they felt would bring out their best. For ¡Simpatico!, Velocity Girl chose John Porter, a veteran musician and producer who had worked on, among other things, the Smiths’ eponymous debut. “Working with John Porter was an amazing experience,” says Moore. “He regaled us with stories about Roxy Music, the Smiths, and the Jam. Paul Weller got him fired from the BBC Maida Vale studios for smoking pot.”
Remembers Nelson, “We definitely drilled [Porter] on some of the Smiths recording tricks he used. More interesting to me was the degree he took on the classic role of producer in talking about our songs themselves. Guitar parts that he suggested, some of which he played, really helped add some sparkle to the songs; in no way comparing it to the level of the Smiths, but from where we were coming from it did add some similar intricacy to the guitar work.”
“[Porter] was, for me anyways, a harsh task master,” says Young. “Lot's of ‘do it again’ type things. Probably because I was such a crap musician.”
“I remember on New Year’s Eve we took a break from recording to go to a big New Year’s Eve party in Mt. Pleasant,” says Spellman. “Everyone was dressed in their best vintage thrift store suits and dresses. We brought Porter, who didn’t have a suit, so he was just wearing an old jean jacket. He got pretty wasted, and some partygoers thought he was a homeless guy who had wandered in and they kicked him out. Thankfully we retrieved him and everything worked out OK. I still laugh at that.”
Recording ¡Simpatico! at Cue Studios in Falls Church in December 1993 and January 1994, Velocity Girl set out to craft “the best record possible,” according to Spellman. “At the time there was a lot of bands that were into a sort of ‘exaltation of the amateur,’ but at that point we weren’t interested in that at all. We wanted to make a record that would stand up to all the great records in our record collections.”
Sometimes that meant a painstaking level of analog engineering nearly unheard of in an era of recording programs like ProTools. Discussing the drum track on “There’s Only One Thing Left to Say,” for instance, Spellman says, “That tune is basically a rip off of the Smiths’ ‘This Charming Man’ and it has a sort of double shuffle beat that always eluded me. I recall toying with the idea of getting one of my pals like Adam Wade or Nick Pellicciotto over to play the drum part on it, but [engineer] Joe [McGrath] ended up splicing together 19 pieces of tape to form one take. It was hair-raising watching him take razor blade to the fat 2” tape, but he did a great job. I can’t hear the edits and it swings pretty good.”
The attention to detail shows: ¡Simpatico! is pure pop pleasure, with clean sonic lines and a bracing directness that allows the songs to shine through in all their unencumbered, grin-inducing glory. On tracks like “Sorry Again,” “I Can’t Stop Smiling,” “The All Consumer,” and “Drug Girls,” the band bashes out the notes will infectious joy as Sarah Shannon and Archie Moore trade lines tinged with just the right shades of melancholy and longing, the vocal harmonies adding layers of complexity and nuance to the album. The guitars are trebly and bright, the drums and bass the definition of punchy, the instruments blending together in an intoxicating sonic cocktail. “Labrador” and “”Hey You, Get Off My Moon” reveal a dreamier, gauzier influence while retaining a rock-solid melodic core.
Listening to the record now, Young feels that ¡Simpatico! was a high point for Velocity Girl. “It is the best record we did, hitting the sweet spot between shambolic local pop band and the rock band that wasn't.” Other members of the band agree.
“For myself, I wanted [¡Simpatico!] to sound better than Copacetic,” says Nelson. “I think we may have gone in to it thinking it would still be a bit more noisy than it ended up. I know some critics and fans were disappointed that it sounded so much more polished than the first record, but in the end that didn't bother me at all. I always loved the way it sounded.”
“I think in retrospect it could have used a dose of the reckless abandon on our earlier singles,” says Spellman, “but that wasn’t where we were at that moment. People seemed to like it…. Always in Velocity Girl we wanted to make records that we would be proud of in 20 years and I am certainly proud of ¡Simpatico!.”
“¡Simpatico! was the record where we pretty much abandoned the ragged, crumbly guitar sound and let the vocals shine through,” says Moore. “I remember worrying that we had given up our musical identity. It wasn't until well after we broke up that ¡Simpatico! became my favorite Velocity Girl record, the only one I can imagine ever putting on.”