By Anna Takala Y11 Codeine Velvet Club is certainly one of those bands you have never heard of. It’s a Scottish band formed in 2009. Their only album doesn’t really have a name, you cannot purchase any of their music on Itunes, and their most popular video on youtube has had only 77 000 views… for a band, that’s not all that much. But nevertheless, their music is different and beautiful in an odd way.
The band came together in 2008-2009, when Jon Lawler (aka Jon Fratelli), the lead singer of The Fratellis, announced he was going to do a small side-project. He joined a solo-artist Lou Hickey, and though the band split only a year later, they achieved a magnificent outcome. They toured in the UK with a substantial number of fans, but the band never made it far. The initial reviews seemed promising, but everything soon died-down. An unheard-of genre called baroque pop had no place on the charts, and the cabaret-style songs were too far-fetched. They only ever remained great to those who had once heard of them.
The most famous song on the album is Vanity Kills, an unusual piece with a beautiful duet of vocals. Jon Lawler’s and Lou Hickey’s voices match together well and create an old-fashioned sounding song when its style is really completely new. Lawler wrote most of the songs by himself, but Hickey did add in her own twists to certain songs. They do a cover of “I am the Resurrection” by The Stone Roses (the stone roses have appeared in an earlier New Music Monday article, but change it so substantially that they make it their own. Several songs were what was supposed to be sung by The Fratellis, but Lawler chose to use it for Codeine Velvet Club instead.
The music is impossible to describe, but once you hear it, it gets your feet to tap and speaks to you on a deeper level. Though the band’s life was short, it produced a true gem.
