I do like it when my personal Instagram, wherein I share pics from my ever=aging concert photo archives, intersects with this blog because it usually means I can save myself some writing on one end or the other. Case in point – today’s release of Velocity Girl’s UltraCopacetic, which revisits and rejuvenates their 1993 debut Copacetic. I’ve already gone over my pilgrimage to Washington DC last Fall to finally see the band perform over on the ‘Gram, so I can just get straight to the matter at hand – the new old album.
Copacetic holds the distinction of being an album many loved despite not particularly liking the sound of it – and that includes the band themselves. The story of it goes as follows:
While the album had strong songs – pop tunes like “Audrey’s Eyes,” “Pop Loser,” and “Living Well” alongside ambitious explorations like “Pretty Sister” and “Here Comes” – the band had little experience with production and lacked the skills to “drive the boat” in the studio. As a result, the album turned out to be a rather stripped-down affair, lacking the lushness of their prior recordings. To the band’s ear it was jarring, and they soon realized this wasn’t the record they hoped to make. Bob Weston had done exactly what was asked of him and captured the sounds, but the band didn’t do its part to articulate a clear vision… Copacetic came out in 1993 and people seemed to like it just fine, but within the band there was a sense of disappointment to the point where most members couldn’t stand to hear the record.
Between then and now, the band learned a lot about recording, and Archie Moore developed a career in audio work, and the band finally decided to revisit Copacetic. After extensive digging, the 2” tape reels appeared in Jim’s ex-wife’s mother’s house, and in the spring of 2023 Archie began working on a remix.
Song by song the new mixes emerged just as the band envisioned them. Soaring vocals from Sarah (who studied opera in college), chiming lead guitar, juicy fuzzed out rhythm guitars and clear pounding drums. The pop songs are much poppier. The sonic blasts are more powerful, and the record hangs together as a cohesive document that flows from song to song. The approach was not to make a 2024 sounding record but rather to go back to the 1992 mindset and create the record the band should have made then. The result, UltraCopacetic (Copacetic Remixed and Expanded), is an exciting alternate history of Copacetic.
Archie gets more specific in conversation with First Revival, a definite RIYL if you’re at this site since you appreciate Toronto-based guys in their 40s waxing at length about shoegaze but might prefer more interviews and actual journalism than YouTube embeds. He and Sarah talk a lot about their early days, the reunion, and revisiting their debut:
Again the reason we came back to this record is that some people in the band, almost right off the bat, felt like this isn’t the record we thought we were making. To get back to the previous answer I gave, we wanted it to sound more like the British records we were listening to, compressed, sparkling, somewhat mildly psychedelic in a noisy pop way, a shoegaze-adjacent record. I don’t think that necessarily came across, even though that had probably come across on our previous singles. So I think some people may have thought that the way the record came out was a statement and I think within the band it was regarded as “we whiffed it.”
Archie Moore, Velocity Girl
An Interview with Velocity Girl @ First Revival
They also mention that a reissue of their self-titled Slumberland EP and 10″ of their Peel Session is coming, which is also exciting and lets me go through more pics from the Black Cat show!
The new old album is out today. Though not the first release in the Velocity Girl archival release series – that’d have been last September’s Setting The Night On Fire With Rock’N’Roll and this past May’s Incidentals – but it’s certainly the most significant and interesting. By way of preview, the band released a cleaned-up version of the video for “Audrey’s Eyes” featuring the new audio (and taking down the old one in the process, so I had to update my post from three years ago with the new clip), a recording of the album’s title track taken from a John Peel session for the BBC in February 1993, and to celebrate the release day, the video for “Crazy Town” which I’ve certainly never seen before!
