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3 of 3 found the following review helpful:
 like a worn out pillow case you never want to part withAug 18, 2006
I bought this record in 1993 when I was 13, that was thirteen years ago, and I still listen to it all the time. It's fuzzy, poppy, rough, loud, soft and beautiful. I still come to realize lyrics after all this time, and "Catching Squirrels" ranks as one of my favorite songs ever. People have compared it to Medicine or The Swirlies, but I honestly have never come across a record quite like it. Buy it.
Inspired, but if you don't get it, you don't get it...May 23, 2006
Velocity Girl's Copacetic is a great album, but it's not for everybody. Archetypical of the low-fi shoe-gazer sound that was ripening to perfection in the early to middle nineties, this recording projects a spectrum of emotions through the lens of fuzzy, feral pop. As with scat, the vocals here are about sound, not a vehicle for poetic lyrics. In this case, the dreamy effect is achieved primarily through the mix.
"Here Comes", the album's 4th track, offers the moodiness characteristic of the genre and the era without sounding obligatory or plodding. "Living Well" and "A Chang" send-up an exuberant cacophony of voice, jangling guitars, and distortion, while "Audrey's Eyes" foreshadows the band's more polished sound that emerges in their best work, the album Simpatico.
This diamond-in-the-rough is exactly the kind of music you'd expect from a talented young band who were just beginning to realize that they had their world on a string. A must-have for fans of My Bloody Valentine or early Breeders.
0 of 2 found the following review helpful:
 not the best/not the worstMay 12, 2005
the mixing and sound quality on this album were horrific...definately covering up the vocals. i enjoyed a couple of songs on here, but mainly it was a noisy, messy album. i did enjoy their later stuff more. i also had the not so pleasurable experience of seeing them live in nyc quite a few years back and they were horrible, which was very dissapointing. but that was in the early 90s..they were still young. :)
shoegazer paradiseJan 06, 2005
I felt obligated to review this after seeing that this album was rated below Simpatico. What? I'm not going to give this album 5 stars. It's extremely good, but it's not perfect. But it's a joke that Simpatico is rated above this.
This album really is a shoegazing gem. An overlooked early 90's indie rock gem. Great hooks, nice fuzzy guitars, and good vocals. There's not a bad song on here, although A Chang, 57 Waltz, Candy Apples and Chasing Squirrels are my favorite tracks.
I've read some people slagging the production. Really. That's Bob Weston. The album was recorded NOT to sound like a Go Go's album. Mr. Weston came out of the Steve Albini school of engineering. While I can understand not liking the aesthetic, (which has been critized for the past 15+ years for putting the music, rather than the vocals forefront) I personally think it sounds great. So, even if you hate it, do keep in mind that the production is intentional. I think it's a very pretty, warm, lo-fi sound. Weston produced/engineered some of the legends of the early 90's indie scene, including Sebadoh, Polvo, Archers of Loaf, etc. Oh yeah, and Weston co-engineered In Utero with Albini. So I think the man knew what he was doing when he decided where to set the levels on this album.
Those great, fuzzed out guitars are front and center in the mix. While I wouldn't go so far as to say that the vocals are buried, they are not mixed like "Our Lips are Sealed."
And I would concur with the previous reviewer that Velocity Girl has never had any connection with "Grunge" whatsoever, apart from the fact that Sub Pop released the lp. If you want to draw stylistic comparison's you could look towards Unrest, who Velocity Girl donated a member to at one point, and to Superchunk. Although, the beautiful thing about Velocity Girl was that they didn't sound like anyone else. Well, until they recorded Simpatico and began making songs that sounded like lots of indie pop bands rather than an indie rawk band.
If you get this cd and enjoy it, I'd point you to another brilliant, but overlooked indie rock album, Blonder Tongue Audio Baton
More imperfect than later releases, and thus very rewardingJul 31, 2004
While not as slickly produced or well sequenced as later VG releases, this album is often more satisfying. Offering a less poppy, more raw picture of the band than later works, Copacetic gives only a small hint of the trend in later albums towards more straightforward pop songcraft and, later on, the ocassional country influences. This is an album with a very DIY garage sound, with many songs having a surprising number of parallels to indie acts coming out of the UK at the time. Quite a few songs have the familiar early 90's "soft-loud-soft-loud" or "loud-soft-loud" structures, but do not sound as dated as most of the music employing that hallmark of the era. Like many british indie albums and a few American releases (Yo La Tengo's "Painful" being the greatest) of 1993, there is a terrific noisy waterfall of guitar noise and feedback riding atop everything in most of the songs, particularly in the majestic opening track (one of my favorites) and "Living Well" which sounds like My Bloody Valentine on happy pills covering Ned's Atomic Dustbin, to the woozy "A Chang" which, just like on an MBV release, "Living Well" flows directly into. The most enjoyable and hummable songs are on the more pop-punk-girl-vocal side, the best of which are "Crazy Town" and "Audrey's Eyes". These latter songs point the way to the equally good, and even more fun album to follow, Simpatico, which finds the band figuring out just how they want to sound. But oh, what fun it is to follow the band as they explore on Copacetic.
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based on 9 reviews
