¡Simpatico! (Remastered and Expanded)

¡Simpatico! (Remastered and Expanded) gives Velocity Girl’s long out-of-print 1994 sophomore album, ¡Simpatico!, an overdue refresh with a sparkling-fresh mastering job and a treasure trove of bonus tracks from the ¡Simpatico! era. The original album sounds better than ever, and it’s complemented by a full album of B-sides and rarities.

Velocity Girl formed in 1989 or so at the University of Maryland outside Washington, DC with guitarist Archie Moore (Black Tambourine), guitarist Brian Nelson (Black Tambourine), drummer Jim Spellman (Starry Eyes, Foxhall Stacks, High Back Chairs, Julie Ocean, Piper Club), bassist Kelly Riles (Starry Eyes), and singer Sarah Shannon (Starry Eyes, The Not Its). The band combined English-inspired noisy shoegaze fuzz with scrappy US indie rock and classic ‘60s-style pop songwriting. A killer single on Slumberland and non-stop touring grabbed the attention of the indie-rock cognoscenti, and soon after Velocity Girl signed a contract with Sub Pop on a car hood in Hoboken, New Jersey. 

After touring in support of their debut, Copacetic, the band spent the better part of a year coming up with a batch of songs for a second album. They had never worked that way before – having focused time, and a budget (from a label!), to make an album that wasn’t a self-produced, punk-rock studio thing was a fresh experience. Having played their new material for months in the noisy style of Copacetic, the band found themselves excited about the tunes, but trying to move away from the scrappy, amateur vibe of their previous records. And their influences were a bit different this time around: less My Bloody Valentine and Wedding Present, more New Order. 

Somebody at Sub Pop connected the band with John Porter, the one-time Roxy Music member who had produced The Smiths, Billy Bragg, The Alarm, and a bunch of other 80’s stuff. They met up on a tour stop in Los Angeles, at a Hamburger Hamlet. He agreed to produce the album, in a three-week session at Cue Studios in Falls Church, VA. He was exactly what the band needed: an editor, arranger, and taskmaster. As he mercilessly excised every unnecessarily repeated bar, the band realized they’d gravitated to a sound with cleaner lines, and almost entirely ditched the noisy guitar, no doubt influenced by Porter’s presence. Velocity Girl was extremely happy with the results, and ¡Simpatico! came out in June of 1994.

This expanded reissue adds eight songs recorded at Inner Ear Studios in Arlington, VA, a few months after the album sessions. These sessions provided playfully experimental B sides to the album’s singles, two cover songs (the New Order cover “Your Silent Face,” and a Beach Boys cover) for a single on Merge Records, and a compilation track.