Velojet

They are the best band in Austria, rock-heroes The Killers say about Velojet. Indie-pop with a British touch describes roughly what this band is doing. By adding strings and choire-parts to a usual band-setup (guitar, bass, drums, piano), they manage to include a very special dramatic facet in their tunes.

VELOJET

“The best band in Austria”
-Ronnie Vannucci / The Killers on Velojet

“Ingenious!”
-Velojet

The revolution will not be improvised. Or improvised jazz, for that matter. Yet it was this primary art of free-form musical expression that bred Velojet’s lasting enthusiasm for sound. In their Steyr homes they delved into their parents’ record collections which yielded a wealth of pulsating grooves of the jazzy variety. One day René Mühlberger, in the style of a jazz musician, started to deviate from his family’s safe, handed-down designs for life when he resolved to fully dedicate his life to music. He pursued studies of classical guitar and graduated from the Gustav Mahler conservatory in Vienna, thus laying the foundation for everything that his father had warned him about.

From that point on, René’s career trajectory has strayed as much from his father’s favour as it has from usual jazz dynamics. Instead, his life started to take on the shape a pop song: Everything has fallen nicely into place, as if it had been subject to fate. At turns it has even appeared as if some of the protagonists in Velojet’s hitherto perfect pop career have been dispatched from the heavens to assist fulfilling the band’s musical destiny. Like René’s buddy Sepp, who built a studio all by himself, seemingly for no reason other than that “you’ve been looking for a studio to record an album with Velojet anyway”. Or the Killers, who generously caught the flu in time for their Vienna concert on February 25th 2005, so as to set up a contrast to what their then support act Velojet do best: Sparkle. As soon as the sound had died down, the sell-out crowd scattered themselves to the four winds to spread the word about the delight that everybody will be able to submerge themselves in from June 6th: Velojet create pure joy out of thin air. Even the choice of their band name signals a determination to wrest the idea (and the spelling) of “getting high” from the perversely distorted parallel world of “A Clockwork Orange” in order to vest it with a new, positive, natural meaning.

Immaculate guitar pop vessels like “Your Side”, “Yesterdays” and “Starting Over”, while they might well have staked their claim to fame from within a Detroit basement studio in 1962, a Californian beach in 1966, or the Liverpool docks anytime between 1967 and the present, echo this essence of human empathy in the assured, acutely contemporary voice of a songwriter who seems to write such miniature symphonies as much out of fun as out of pure necessity: "I need to write songs in order to feel good.” The overriding sentiment conveyed by the songs on Velojet’s self-titled debut album is one of longing for harmony, both within the band, but also within the greater framework of human society. And promptly Mühlberger Sr. slips in through the back door of Track No. 8, delivering the trumpet part his son has arranged in his head (!) to the best of his chest size. After that, “Part Of The Plan” is a further discreet nod to Jazz, Funk, and a mischievously obstinate inner life that defies categorization.

“Our sole purpose is to continue with this band. More than anything else, I’m looking forward to working with my bandmates in ever more elaborate ways, regardless of the result.”, René asserts. “I’m not going to let this experience of recording the album be ruined by the weight of public expectation. It was far too enjoyable for that.” And, apparently, inevitable.