Time Wraps Around You

On reuniting with a favorite LP by Velvet Crush

Greetings, dear Jagged Time Lapse readers! I’m back in the saddle after a much-needed break, which included a handful of wonderful birthday celebrations — because I basically celebrate all month — a whirlwind 48 hours in NYC, a romantic dinner at an old-school eye-tralian restaurant, and the above album appearing on my doorstep. Not a bad week, really…

I have loved Velvet Crush’s Teenage Symphonies to God since the summer of 1994, when the advance promo cassette of it showed up at the offices of the L.A. Reader, where I’d recently begun working full-time as the assistant music and calendar editor. I immediately snapped it up and excitedly popped it into the boom box on my desk.

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The cassette’s arrival took me completely by surprise. I’d been a huge fan of Velvet Crush’s first album, 1991’s Matthew Sweet-produced In the Presence of Greatness, but since I hadn’t heard anything after 1992’s The Post Greatness EP, I kinda figured that the trio must have gone the way of so many other underappreciated bands and quietly split up. It wasn’t as if I could just go to their website or social media accounts and learn that they’d been signed to the Epic subsidiary 550 Music (a development with perhaps ominous portent, considering that the same label had completely botched the release and promotion of Flop’s incredible Whenever You’re Ready just a year earlier), or that their new album was being produced by the great Mitch Easter of Let’s Active and R.E.M. fame.

It’s difficult to convey now just how happy Teenage Symphonies to God made me back in 1994, or how much I took it as a sign that all was well — or at least heading that way — with the universe. Not only was a fantastic band whose existence had been largely unknown outside of indie/underground circles suddenly making their major label debut, but the album’s title and artwork offered a knowing reference to Brian Wilson’s fabled (and as yet still unreleased) Smile project. If you knew, you knew… and you knew that the new Velvet Crush album was for you

Even more gratifying was the fact that the album was a huge step forward from Greatness. While that record was filled with hooky, hard-driving guitar pop (the term “power pop” hadn’t come back into vogue just yet), Sweet’s lo-fi production had made it sound like little more than a glorified demo, and the song-to-song similarities in tone and tempo made much of it run together as if the band were simply pounding through their usual live set with the tape running.

Which was certainly awesome enough in its own way, but Teenage Symphonies played out like a full-fledged album. The production was richer and warmer, the musical interplay more dynamic, the songs (and instrumental approach) more varied, and the vocals and harmonies more clearly audible in the mix. But best of all was the fact that every single song on the album either matched or flat-out surpassed their counterparts on Greatness in terms of sheer quality. Teenage Symphonies completely flouted the calcified paradigm of the major label letdown; on every level, it was actually an improvement over the indie release that had caused me to fall in love with the band in the first place.

Teenage Symphonies’ rockers were all pretty great (my favorites were “Hold Me Up,” “My Blank Pages,” “This Life Is Killing Me” and the Teenage Fanclubby “Star Trip”), if also pretty much in line with what I would have expected from the band. But the album’s curveballs were equally appealing — like the gorgeous mid-tempo hug of “Time Wraps Around You,” the pensive “#10” (which sounded a little like The Left Banke gone acoustic) and the jangly alienation of “Weird Summer”.

Also unexpected (by me at least) were the “cosmic country” influences that Paul Chastain, Ric Menck and Jeffrey Underhill had clearly been soaking up, as evidenced by the band’s heartbreaking cover of Gene Clark’s “Why Not Your Baby” (complete with gorgeously fluid pedal steel from Greg Leisz) and the back-porch musings of “Keep On Lingerin’”. Velvet Crush were casting their stylistic net wider this time out, and it not only worked, but all of the newer elements and ingredients they came up with worked well together.

Alas, despite some great press (like my placement of it at the top of my “Best Albums of ‘94” list in the Reader) and some choice opening slots to support it (including a tour with the then-ascendant Oasis), Teenage Symphonies to God didn’t click with the public. I related to the melancholy chorus of “Weird Summer” — “Weird Summer/I don’t know who I am/Weird summer/I’ve been sleeping again” — much more than I did to any of the angst-heavy expectorations served up that year by Pearl Jam and various grunge-come-latelies, but the deep emotions running through this album were expressed way too subtly to appeal to mainstream rock fans of the mid-nineties. Teenage Symphonies would be the band’s only release for a major label, and Velvet Crush wouldn’t release another record until 1998.

Having appeared during the period where the majors were phasing out vinyl in favor of CDs, Teenage Symphonies was pressed in limited amounts in the UK and didn’t even make it out on vinyl in the US, and thus I’d only ever heard it on cassette or CD. So when BackGroove Records announced a month or so ago that they were going to do a US-only vinyl repress in conjunction with Mill City Sound, I hit the “pre-order” button faster than you could say “Faster Days”. (You can still purchase it here.)

Upon its arrival this week, I wound up listening to the album several times in a row in a single sitting. It just sounded so damn good that I felt compelled to hear it again and again. But it was also like being reunited with an old friend you haven’t seen in ages; you spend the first hour or so going to yourself, “Wow, they’re actually here,” before your brain and emotions settle down enough to allow the full absorption of the experience. The first time through the album, I marveled at the sheer excellence of the songs; on the second and third spins, I began zeroing in on the vocal arrangement of “Time Wraps Around You,” the guitar battle of “Atmosphere,” the tasty pedal steel touches on “Faster Days,” and other thrilling details that I’d originally been too overjoyed and overwhelmed to notice.

I’m sure many other such details will pop up in subsequent spins; but right now, I’m just happy to have my old pal back in my living room. Life hasn’t turned out quite like either of us hoped back in 1994, but I’m so glad that we’re both still around.

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