When Maryland's Velocity Girl came shimmering out of Sub Pop with their debut album in 1993, Bob Weston's wall-of-noise production couldn't hide the gleeful melodism of the singles "Crazy Town" and "Audrey's Eyes" (and if this song doesn't automatically force you to picture Sherilyn Fenn in saddle shoes, you and I might have trouble relating to each other), the squalling "Pretty Sister" (my personal fave), or "Pop Loser", which is totally pop despite a lyric mocking those who sing la-la shit. And no group in that lo-fi scene had a singer like the opera-trained Sarah Shannon. Burying her clarion pipes way down in the mix couldn't hide that either.
Upon learning that Sub Pop would be reissuing Copacetic as an expanded and, more alarmingly, remixed double-LP called UltraCopacetic, I feared guitarist/remixer Archie Moore would re-envision his grungy gust of melody and fuzz box hurly-burly with cleaner lines, that Shannon's voice would rise up in the mix, that the album would end up sounding more like the band's squeaky clean second album, Simpatico! This notion gave me pause. The original mix's rough yet gripping alchemy could get polished away. Simpatico! is really good, but Copacetic is its own thing and should remain as such.
I certainly wasn't expecting the remix to sound quite as it does. Instead of the whole thing skewing cleaner and poppier with more pronounced vocals, as I was hoping it wouldn't, each side of its salty-sweetness is just more more. The layers of noise sound nastier. The sheets of shimmering jangle gleam brighter. Shannon's voice is still fairly low in the mix, which is key because a good deal of Copacetic's appeal is its specific atmosphere, the sound of a strong voice shouting to be heard from the center of a swirling tornado of guitars.
Many previously unheard details gust to the fore in this new mix: subtle shades of echo, shivering tremolo effects, the stuttering piano and hollow-cheeked percussion of "Pop Loser", the ΓΌber-deep guitar growl that blows "Living Well" apart, as well as other debris. I must admit that as skeptical as I was, and as much as I'm resistant to hearing old friends with new voices, UltraCopacetic sounds better than Copacetic. A really terrific album becomes a great one... a rare development in a remix-crazy age.
I was hoping that more of the material on Velocity Girl's early singles, collected on an essential eponymous CD EP in 1993, might appear on UltraCopacetic's bonus LP, because it doesn't seem likely that any of that stuff will see some sort of vinyl reissue otherwise. But only "Always" appears amongst the bonus tracks. The stuff that is included, though, is very good: an excellent track from a split 7" with Tsunami, wild B-sides from Copacetic's two singles, one outtake, and a clutch of Peel sessions that Moore's new liner notes insist are closer to the sound his band had envisioned than Copacetic's original mix was in his new liner notes. (The fact that his notes also include a passing reference to Twin Peaks makes me wonder if I'd been right about "Audrey's Eyes" all along!)
As for the red-vinyl pressing, it's mostly fine. The LPs are both flat with well-centered spindle holes. LP-1 is largely free of unintended noise and distortion, but there are some fairly long non-fill passages in "A Chang" that cause clicks audible through the music, and this issue also arises at the very end of each side. LP-2 begins with some gritty surface noise, although this basically disappears when "Warm/Crawl" kicks in. Noise returns between songs throughout Side C, but generally fails to upset the music. Side D suffers from some non-fill and groove distortion, which can get fairly invasive at times. UltraCopacetic is still a superb package and makes me hope that a Simpatico reissue is also in the works.
