velvet starlings – hg wells

If you’re looking for a ridiculously fun and enjoyable song about time travel, then today’s offering from Velvet Starlings will tick all the boxes for you.

Velvet Starlings latest single, HG Wells, is a thoroughly enjoyable blast of psychedelic/ punk rock that just invades your sense and forces you to sing along and smile.

With layered vocals and fuzz guitar, this is a song with bucketloads of attitude. The hugely fun lyrics that pay tribute to all the best sci-fi characters and authors made all of us nod and smile on several occasions throughout our listens of this brief, 2 minutes and 44 seconds track.

HG Wells has lots of different sections to it to help maintain the listeners interest, all very coherently merged together to form a song which is thoroughly enjoyable from start to finish.

With a 20 date UK tour in the pipeline, this US based band are exclusively releasing HG Wells in the UK and Europe (if you can’t connect to the Spotify link above, we urge you to find the band on YouTube). We can see that this song will have great appeal, especially in the UK. The references to Dr Who alone will be enough to draw in a certain fanbase. We especially love the effect on the vocals in places. A boost in the vocals in the 1.5kHz range, together with some doubling and other effects make them sound almost dalek-like. We’re sure this was intentional and shows a great attention to detail.

Further attention to detail means that the soundscape almost makes it feel like you’re listening to a sci-fi theme tune. Moments in the guitar line in particular sounded like the infamous Dr Who theme tune and Tom Baker would no doubt be super- impressed with this fun track.

The thing that stands out most for us is that this is surely a band to go and see live. We highly doubt from the lyrics that they take themselves too seriously, but it’s also very clear that they take their music seriously. If you’re in the UK, please make the effort to go check out their tour dates;

https://www.velvetstarlings.com/tour

From a production perspective, we’d suggest a boost around 60Hz to give the kick drum a little more meat. We’d choose to cut the snare track at around 160Hz where the tuning of the snare is just a touch dominant. Perhaps a cut in the 2.5-3kHz to counter a little too much character in that area and a large wide boost of the top octave for some more brightness and air.

We love this latest track from Velvet Starlings. A fun and enjoyable track for fans of 60s Britpop and West Coast indie rock, this one will be sure to entertain. Make sure you pop in to Forbidden Planet in London while you’re on tour, guys!!