January White Label Series
Yoni Wolf on The Ophelias
"I first randomly came across The Ophelias a couple years ago playing a gig on the 4th of July at a park near my house. I had just been in the parade playing a kombucha bottle with a stick stick (like from a tree, not a drum stick) and found myself in a tincture and rhythm fueled trance, dumped out of the parade into this little park. And there they were— The Ophelias: four teenage girls up on a temporary stage, playing, what to me at the time, sounded like a mix between Velvet Underground, underground British psych-noise-folk-rock from the late ‘90s / early 2000’s (think Hood, Movietone, Crescent), and some kind of softer side of punk. I had a little conversation with myself. “Is this good?” “Yeah this is good.” “Fuck yeah this is good.” But with the makeshift PA in the outdoor acoustics, I couldn’t even really hear what the singer was saying.
Flash forward a month or so and I ended up at a weird little show at a community center for another young band I had met at the Music Resource Center where I volunteer. Lo and behold, three of four Ophelias were side-women in that band (The Wonderful Sadists). I was able to buy The Ophelias’ hot-off-the-press CDR there with handmade collagey album art. It contained the very songs you hold in your hand now. I went home and popped it in. Now I could hear the lyrics and the arrangements more clearly. Wow! So intuitive and naturally inventive arrangement-wise and the lyrics were so honest and emotional, with a sense of humor and not at all cliché. And the singer was so dry and understated. I was IN. I listened to nothing else for the next month or two. All I wanted to hear was Creature Native. I’m listening to it again now as I write this and I have to say, I still feel the same way."
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