Velour 100

Item: Of Color Bright
Author: Alex Klages

Of Color Bright

(1997)

Reviewed by Alex Klages

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Label Tooth & Nail RecordsThe LighthouseDecember 1997

dream pop indie pop noise pop shoegaze

This album puts me to sleep.

Let me explain. It's not often that a record can put me to sleep. Boring or dull albums make me edgy, not sleepy. This album has just that quality of well-crafted, droning guitar pop to create a dreamy mood. The mood is so infectious that I relax and fall asleep.

This time out, it's a slightly different Velour 100 than we've previously heard. The current band has no lead singer. So, to fill the gap left by Amon Krist's departure, Trey Many has enlisted some of his friends, like Sydney (Morella's Forest), Tess Wiley (Phantasmic, formerly of Sixpence), and Karin Oliver (from Many's other band, His Name Is Alive).

While you'd think that the different lead singers would lead to an unfocussed sound, this isn't the case. Like the late-80's incarnation of White Heart, Velour 100 proves you can have a coherent sound while spreading vocal duties across several people. The singers each bring their own nuances to how they approach the songs, making the sound palette a little more varied.

As I mentioned earlier, the album's sound is that droning guitar pop that Starflyer 59 and Morella's Forest have become known for, but not quite as hard-edged-almost contemplative in tone. As Tess Wiley gets the nod for lead vocals more often than either Sydney or Oliver, her fans may find a hidden gem here. If you've heard a lot about noise pop, but never given it a try, you could do far worse than this as an introduction.

There's only a couple of small reservations I have about this album. One is the song "Control Panel," which sounds rather like a Joy Electric song, and seems somewhat out of place in the context of the previous ten songs. It's almost as though Many, Matt Hudson (guitars) and Jeremy Dybash (drums) got to the end of the recording session and decided they needed one last song, quickly. Not that it's a bad track; it just seems out of place. The other problem I had was with the intermittent staccato drum bursts. Although interesting, they quickly become tiresome. Fortunately there's only a couple of these on the album. These reservations notwithstanding, Velour 100's latest is one of the better noise pop (or as they call it, "space pop") albums I've heard in a while.