Biography
Outdoor Velour began life, like many bands, as pieces of confetti leftover from the breakup party thrown for another act. Greg Simpson, half of the current Outdoor Velour lineup, recruited Cara Kinnally in 2008 to play bass and sing with a band Greg was playing drums for. That band’s inevitable breakup gave rise to Outdoor Velour.
Anyone who has ever spent time trying to tour with a band full of different personalities knows that sometimes smaller is better. By some miracle, the two members of Outdoor Velour have the natural ability to play every instrument they wanted to include on the upcoming Portrait EP. Outdoor Velour perform as a duo but sound at times like a quintet.
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Outdoor Velours’ first shows happened in December of 2010—the songs played in those first three appearances eventually became the band’s debut EP Don't Panic, released February 8th, 2011. They spent that year playing all over Indiana and the Midwest, promoting the just-released EP and spending what little spare time they had writing new songs. Thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign, Greg and Cara headed to Apocalypse Cow studios in Montgomery, IL and spent two days in June of 2012 tracking four new songs, the forthcoming Portrait EP.
The cover of Portrait is, well, an actual custom portrait of the two band members and their beloved pets, made in the style of the classic painting American Gothic. The cover was put together for the band by Indianapolis-based artist Candice Hartsough McDonald. Portrait will hit the streets on August 28th, 2012, on CD and in digital format.
It is difficult to describe the sound of the band without launching into a college-radio thesis. I could say that the track “It’s Easy” is like Kool-Aid for the heart. In fact, everything on the new EP sounds a little like what Acid House Kings would have recorded had that band attended church camp instead of . . . I don’t know, frown camp?
The EP is a nod to great pop music of decades past: you can taste Portrait like a complex wine, noting here a 60s Motown groove, there a heavy dose of 80s Jesus and Mary Chain distortion, a hint of early-90s shoegaze. But the “finish,” to continue the wine analogy, is that JAMC drone, a buzz that hangs on long after the last track ends. It acts as a foil to Outdoor Velours’ otherwise mom-and-dad friendly sound. It’s as if the band is saying: "Hey, remember grunge? We do too, and we liked it, and we want to make some more.”
What you will love about Outdoor Velour is this: the songs are easy to swallow but nourishing all the same. The record is an acai-blueberry smoothie for the ear canal. The storyteller is talking to us about ourselves, but also about himself and about all of the other folks we see listening to their iPods and jogging. Listen: this is Greg and Cara, but it is also Joe and Dave, Emily and Eric, Leslie and Micah, Dr. and Mrs. Howell.
Portrait is as complex an EP as you’ll find this year, at once nostalgic for a 1980s music scene (that never really existed, such is the essence of nostalgia) and looking ahead to an era when we can sit down and tell our kids about Kurt Cobain and Monica Lewinsky. About Pearl Jam and Clinton's famous insistence that he "didn't inhale." When we teach them about love and about the pains of love. Outdoor Velour brings it all together under the guise of a track suits’ nickname to produce a record like nothing you’ve heard since Mike Meyers was making funny movies.
You have a date on August 28th. It’s with Outdoor Velour. You’ll be tasting Portrait. It goes well with grilled meats, wild mushrooms, and just about anything.
Biography text from Last.fm, available under CC BY-SA.