It’s 7:05 p.m. and it’s dark inside the repurposed elementary school
now called the Phinney Neighborhood Association.
Perched on the
ridge, its schoolhouse windows frame the under-lying valley—Green
Lake and the trees and houses that surround it—like a giant
university campus, with the Cascades for a backdrop.
The smell of tater tots is in the air, and there are faint voices at
the far end of a long hall. Past the last room on the right and up a
few more stairs sit Andrew Means and Michael Burton, chief songwriters
for one of Seattle’s best bands, Greenwood-based Velella Velella.
Means’s office has blood-red walls, a desk, monitors, a swivel
chair, a sofa, bookcases, a turntable, and hundreds of records. It’s
where he runs a web-design and print studio called Mountbracken and
Campbell. In true Velella style, it’s a clean and stylish haven, an
annex in a castle. And it’s not tater tots; Michael is eating French
fries.
But the posters on these walls—along with the sofa and
stacked, scattered records—recall another office in another
city.
In 2004, Means was about to leave Spokane, Washington, the jewel of
the inland Northwest, and quit his graphic-design job at the Local
Planet, a now-defunct alternative weekly where current Velella
Velella member Jeremy Hadley was music editor one year before. Downtown
at Planet headquarters on the sixth floor of a big building,
Means’s office looked the same as it does now, down to the records, the
sofa, and the posters (minus the red walls).
A few blocks away at the B-Side (the only cool venue in town, also
now defunct), Means and Burton played music. In blue-collar, rock-out
Spokane, Velella Velella was too abstract: The funk-snap bass, watery
vibraphone, and shattered, lurching, programmed beats intrigued, then
annoyed and lost people. Too broken to move bodies, it could only hope
to move minds as dance floors emptied and people left the building.
“Going back and listening to what we made when we were first
starting, I can see why a lot of people weren’t into it,” says
Burton.
“When we started doing Velella, we were like, ‘This is our project.
This is for us,'” Means adds. He likens it to a restaurant that only
served carrots and chocolate.
The band moved to Seattle, picked up Hadley and Sylvia Chen (of
electro-pop group the Long Ranger), and diversified their sound, adding
vocals, extra synths (the band perform with five keyboards), and
recognizable song structures. “More avenues for people to get into the
music,” Means says. The band quickly became something to feel rather
than just mentally appreciate, and their live draw is now significant
and faithful.
Velella Velella’s third release, the Flight Cub EP, is the
band’s best yet, a superconcise postcard from an undiscovered place,
the work of a band creating and nailing their own sound. Flight
Cub fans may not have heard the Spokane-era first album—the
loose, experimental By the Wind Sailor—but many know
2005’s Bay of Biscay, the band’s breakthrough album. At once
clear-eyed and drugged-out, Biscay‘s soul funk converted
legions of local rock/dance/rap audiences into fist-pumping acolytes,
launched two American tours, got picked up for distribution by Hush,
and
secured Velella as a KEXP mainstay.
But the five-song Flight Cub is simpler and tighter.
Assured vocal hooks, especially from Means and Chen, push things into
breezy pop territory. Bass lines still snap like bear traps, but also
float Totoro-huge, lumbering like the Marshmallow Man. Cartoonish synth
squeaks and circular, skittering high-hats are perfectly offbeat,
recalling latter-day J. Dilla (RIP) without biting his style. There’s
distorted, driving jazz-rock fusion, the kind that pisses off
purists.
It’s also an emotionally rousing record about leaps of faith, with
clear lyrical themes of personal empowerment. The title track goes,
“You can rest your body/When you realize that/It’s alright to be
holding on.” Preaching acceptance in the face of cosmic indifference,
Velella will help you through hard times. The band’s standard
soul-saving shouted hook works best on “Brass Ass,” a song that
mandates proud responsibility be taken for life in general: “You’ve got
to own it!”
Means says his aim for Velella is “to be really bold about the
reality of joy.” He hates that music is ever taken ironically, says
that’s like dating a stupid girl for the ego boost. Burton agrees:
Velella is all about making people feel the music, all about ecstatic
moments of community.
The hundreds of records around the office are also part of Means and
Burton’s evangelical thrust. The Velella house is built on soul music,
and in Means’s iTunes playlist, 23 of his 25 most recently played songs
are by black artists. He’s no race warrior, but, like New
Yorker pop-music critic Sasha Frere-Jones, Means thinks most hip,
independent music these days is whitewashed. He’d be thrilled to turn
indie-rock kids on to the music he takes for source material.
Using strictly analog equipment (save some programmed drums),
Velella’s cultural learnings from 1970s funk/soul/jazz records get
regurgitated in the basement studio of the home they share. In Means’s
office, as in the studio, there’s an enthusiasm for weird, challenging
sounds—we listen to records by Gary Wilson and heroin-period
Miles Davis; they’re incredible.
The guys suggest more: the Sylvers, Denny Zeitlin, the Intruders.
They are spreading the word, teaching the fundamentals, showing and
proving how and why Velella Velella does what they do.
The next day, Means sends me a new Velella track. Feel-good and
spacey, it’s a breakbeat-backed, roller-skating party jam. The refrain,
true to Velella Velella’s mission, just wants to get everybody on the
same funky page: “We get you if you feel it too.” 