Loading details…
Artist
Velo Deluxe
12+ albums
90'salternative rock
about
Over the years, John Strohm's musical career has taken an increasingly iconoclastic tangent, from his days with the Lemonheads (with Evan Dando) to the bracing indie pop of Blake Babies (with Juliana Hatfield) to two albums with Antenna, a more left-of-center outfit – and now to Velo-Deluxe, his latest trio. On Superelastic, Strohm expresses himself like an action painter, using his electric guitar's palette of effects for brush strokes. It's abstract at times, animated by a barrage of dissimilar elements competing for your ear, suggesting a dynamic fusion of contradictions: ugliness and beauty, hope and despair, lassítude and resolve, momentum and inertia. In his lyrics, Strohm admits confusion – and demonstrates an all-too-keen grasp of reality. Although its details are personal and guarded, Superelastic, in this sense, speaks to the experience of any twentysomething post-collegian whose future looks as bleak as the one the punks gobbed at back in the '70s. Strohm's world view is refracted through a hazy pop filter, with all the blurs and untidiness left intact as part of his statement. This is definitively rendered in the four-song fusillade that opens the album: the title track; a song whose title is a slightly modified version of the band's name ("Vello Deluxe"); the elegiac "Simple"; and the scarifying "Dirtass." On that last song, kind of a "Psychotic Reaction" for the '90s, Strohm screams: "I feel sick, and I feel dirty/Might be dead before I'm 30." On "Superelastic
