Happy 30th Anniversary to Velocity Girl’s second studio album ¡Simpatico!, originally released June 14, 1994.
Although they’re known mostly as a Washington, D.C. band, Velocity Girl formed in the late ’80s in Maryland’s D.C.-adjacent College Park neighborhood when the band were University of Maryland students. Their shoegaze-inspired sounds and shimmering pop sensibilities would set them apart from the much more macho, aggressive political punk of the D.C. scene.
In fact, they might have even been seen as a little bit wimpy. “I have an anecdote that sums up how I think the D.C. punk scene regarded us,” guitarist Archie Moore told DCist in 2009. “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.’”
Velocity Girl were fine with their wimpy status, however. They weren’t trying to fit in with the muscularity of Ian MacKaye’s Dischord label. In fact, they were much more inspired by the twee pop of Glasgow’s Postcard label and the indie-pop of New Zealand’s Flying Nun Records. “I think a lot of people have this idea that because bands like us weren’t doing hardcore that we were rebelling against it or something, but we were just interested in different music,” bassist Kelly Riles mused to MTV’s 120 Minutes. “We just wanted to do something different—there wasn’t a competition or an animosity about it.”
Still, Velocity Girl would have the last laugh when they eventually signed to Sub Pop and their 1993 debut album Copacetic became the label’s second best-selling album, surpassed only by Nirvana’s Bleach (1989). Their second album, 1994’s ¡Simpatico!, would garner MTV attention with a Spike Jonze-directed video, and 1995 would see them enjoying even more mainstream success with the inclusion of their song “My Forgotten Favorite” on the Clueless soundtrack.
The band started out as the Goterdammacrats in 1989, when Archie Moore and bassist Kelly Riles met on the concert committee at the University of Maryland. Soon, they met drummer Jim Spellman and Bridget Cross, who would become their lead singer. They re-christened themselves Velocity Girl after a Primal Scream B-side.
There were other bands in Velocity Girl’s orbit—Big Jesus Trashcan, Black Tambourine, and the Powderburns—none of which resonated with the DC post-hardcore scene, and Moore and his friend Mike Schulman starting kicking around the idea of putting out a compilation. So they started their own little indie label they named Slumberland Records and began making four-track recordings in Moore’s basement.
Bridget Cross eventually lost interest in the band, joining Unrest as their lead vocalist a few months later. Fortunately, Jim Spellman knew a woman named Sarah Shannon from the University of Maryland, who Moore and Riles also vaguely knew because she worked at the Record Co-Op near campus. Shannon had formally studied singing in school, and so she definitely had the chops, but at first the band were uncertain whether her rock style would work for them. Still, she stuck to her Pretenders and Blondie-inspired vocals, while the band brought in a second guitar player, Brian Nelson, whose group Black Tambourine had just broken up, and Velocity Girl’s new sound ended up coming together. In fact, Shannon’s sunny slight vibrato would end up becoming a key ingredient in Velocity Girl’s recognizability.
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The band had been working on a song called “Forgotten Favorite” and when Nelson began practicing with them it sounded particularly amazing, so they decided to record it a week later, releasing it on Slumberland in 1992. The song wound up becoming a surprise hit on college radio, attracting the attention of Sub Pop, who offered Velocity Girl the opportunity to do a split Sub Pop Single of the Month with fellow DC band Tsunami. Mostly, the band regarded the chance to put out the slide guitar-tinged “Warm/Crawl” on Sub Pop as a lucky fluke.
Velocity Girl then embarked on a brief East Coast tour, and when they played in Boston and Providence, their new friend Joyce Linehan let them stay at her house, which doubled as Sub Pop’s East Coast office. Meanwhile, the band had been planning to self-finance and record a full-length album on Slumberland. Some of Velocity Girl’s members had continued playing in other bands, and so they didn’t really think Velocity Girl would last much longer as a project, but they still wanted to put out a low-key showcase of what they’d been working on.
But then, after Velocity Girl played a festival in Providence one weekend, Joyce Linehan approached them about signing with Sub Pop. “We thought about it for a few days. At that time, the label was still very much associated with Seattle and grunge, which we weren't really keen on, but they also put out Beat Happening and Codeine and a few other things we loved. We accepted the offer,” Moore recalled to Perfect Sound Forever, adding that he promptly quit the other band he’d been playing with.
Velocity Girl recorded their debut album Copacetic with producer Bob Weston in Memphis for a mere $6,000. Weston then mixed the album in his friend Steve Albini’s attic studio in Chicago. Albini generously allowed the entire band to stay at his house while he was away recording another album (possibly PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me).
Copacetic led to a slot opening for Belly, whose single “Feed The Tree” had become an MTV Buzz Bin hit, and the large-venue tour garnered Velocity Girl increased exposure. At the same time, the local D.C. alternative station WHFS ended up playing “Audrey’s Eyes,” a single from Copacetic, so much that it ended up in the station’s Top 100 of the year. By the end of the Belly tour, Sub Pop asked Velocity Girl if they’d like to extend and also upgrade their contract (they did). And then, of course, there’s the wonderful fact that Copacetic eventually earned Sub Pop bestseller status, in league with Bleach.
However, much like Bleach would wind up being a much rougher version of Nirvana’s sound compared to the rest of their output, so would Copacetic be for Velocity Girl. Its noisy shoegaze would lead to endless comparisons to My Bloody Valentine, which the band didn’t always welcome. "I hate that," bassist Kelly Riles told the Washington Post in a 1993 profile of the band. "I'm not going to say we're not interested in English bands, but I think we're more influenced by other bands, more obscure bands like the Wedding Present. Because of the whole English thing, we've been listening to a lot of American bands like Pavement and Sebadoh."
Part of the problem might have been the mixing Weston did at Steve Albini’s house, which lent the album a rougher sound. In 2023, Velocity Girl spoke to the Washington Post again, this time about how they had decided after all these years to remix Copacetic to their satisfaction. “A lot of the material sounds, to my ear, drastically different,” drummer Jim Spellman said of the new mix. “The shoegazey kind of stuff sounds more shoegazey, the pop stuff sounds way more pop. It feels like what we set out to do.”
When it came time to record their second album ¡Simpatico! at the end of 1993, Velocity Girl decided to spend more time on it, and to do it locally. Sub Pop connected them with producer John Porter, best known for his work with The Smiths. They recorded the album at Cue Studios in Falls Church, VA, and braced themselves for Porter’s taskmaster approach, doing take after take to a click track. The result is a much tighter, more controlled, cleaner-sounding band, and ¡Simpatico! is arguably Velocity Girl’s opus.
I still remember my feeling of excitement when I first came upon ¡Simpatico! and its brightly colored patchwork cover at the age of 17. I’d spent all of my adolescence on an American army base in Germany, so I’d developed a habit of poring over SPIN magazine and maintaining a long list of all the obscure albums I wanted to buy on summer visits to my grandparents’ in Minnesota. By 1994, however, both of my grandparents had died and my parents were in the middle of a messy divorce. I wasn’t sure when, or if, I’d get back to the states anytime soon. Fortunately, the cheesy record store on our army base, Sight N’ Sound, had increasingly begun carrying alternative albums as the ’90s wore on, and one day I stumbled upon a lone copy of ¡Simpatico! among the bins. It felt like I had won the lottery.
None of my friends were as crazy and obsessive about discovering new music as I was, and so ¡Simpatico! became a bedroom album for me, something I’d listen to while doing homework or painting my toenails, my own little private treasure. It wasn’t until I reconnected with an old friend, Kara, a few years later that I found someone else who loved Velocity Girl as much as I did. Kara had moved to the D.C. area after leaving Germany at the end of junior high and so, to her, Velocity Girl was low-level famous.
¡Simpatico! kicks off with the jangly, careening “Sorry Again” whereby Sarah Shannon manages to sound both remorseful and jubilant—“It’ll never happen again / Is a promise I just can't keep / When I'm all alone on the porch / And you're drifting off to sleep.” The video, featuring the band playing in a living room with a carpet of grass and flowers and then, eventually, covered in falling snow, would air on MTV’s 120 Minutes and spawn many a school-boy crush on the doe-eyed Shannon.
The next song, “There’s Only One Thing Left To Say,” can only be described as a romp and a bop, while “Tripping Wires” perfectly encapsulates Velocity Girl’s unique blend of sunny sadness, while also supplying the album’s most memorable line: “Never liked boys prettier than me, I warned you.”
“I Can’t Stop Smiling” is sludgy ’90s alt-rock at its best, and the campy Spike Jonze-directed video applies a ’50s-throwback Weezer sensibility to a family-photo concept. It’s hard not to be amused as the band poses in front of a cloudy-sky backdrop, with the boys wearing Buddy Holly glasses and gee-whiz smiles, while Shannon poses separately as a big-haired prom queen.
“Drug Girls” is a shimmery pop confection with a cautionary tale about hanging out with the wrong crowd—“Open it wider / See what it’s really all about / Drug girls don't tell the truth.” Is it a little bit ’80s Dare program? Sure. But it’s also a fantastic song.
Meanwhile, the dreampoppy “Hey You, Get Off My Moon” provides the album with a necessary dark moodiness, a spare Sundays-esque study in sadness—“Hey you, get off my moon / There's not air for two on my moon / There's no atmosphere when you're near.” Its melancholy is matched by the closing fingerpicked instrumental “Wake Up, I’m Leaving,” an appropriately wordless end to an album that guides us through many moods and textures.
Velocity Girl would end up making one last album, 1996’s Gilded Stars and Zealous Hearts, before they broke up amid a collective feeling that the band had run its course. Then last year, in addition to remixing Copacetic, Velocity Girl was invited by legendary D.C. nightclub The Black Cat to headline the second night of its 30th anniversary celebration. It was a nod to Velocity Girl’s importance in the D.C. music scene after all, and the first time they’d played together in more than two decades.
“For me, personally, and I think for a lot of people, it was the idea that for the first and probably last time we would be able to play in front of our kids,” Archie Moore told the Washingtonian.He added, somewhat relatably to most fans, “My kid’s a Swiftie and she has never even really been particularly curious about Velocity Girl until recently.”
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