Vuvuvultures are a band people are constantly trying to add to one genre or another; Electronic, Pop, Underground, Indie have all been used to describe their sound. This in itself shows the success of Vuvuvultures to be able to create and experiment with music and sounds to be able to cover all of the list above. They play the music they want to play and create the sounds that they want to hear, they aren’t out there to please the masses but are more than happy when people appreciate their end result.
Speaking to Vuvuvultures, made up by Harmony Boucher (Vocals) Nicole Bettencourt Coelho (Bass) Paul Ressel (Guitar) and Matt Christensen (Drums) we’re sat in The Premises, drinking beer, listening to an Amy Winehouse album being played and discuss their name, their inspirations and ‘that’ bad review that featured links with Miley Cyrus and The X-Factor.
You’re starting your UK tour next week, you guys looking forward to it?
Matt: Yes very much!
Harmony: Will be nice to get out of London for a long period of time, playing every night.
Nicole: We’re generally road tripping fans as a concept.
You’re album was released early this year and has been well received, do you read the reviews?
Harmony: Some of them we shouldn’t read but we do. They tend to find there way to us by one of our friends.
Nicole: Yeah our friends will usually go like “Ah Ha!” we found this shit review of you guys!
You tweeted about The Fly Magazine’s review being the worst review you have received…
Nicole: It was spectacularly bad, like they actually deserved a medal for how bad it was.
To me it look like he was just waiting to use an analogy with Miley Cyrus…
Matt: That’s what I thought as well, I didn’t understand where that came from!
Nicole: I think it’s from Harmony’s blonde hair cut with the shaved sides. Miley had just done the shoot with Terry Richardson and she basically had the same haircut.
Harmony: I don’t think it matters what I do with my hair, it gets compared to someone that’s just recently released an album.
Nicole: Yeah, so we read it and were like, oh wow, Miley Cyrus and X-Factor, does that mean we are a commercial band now?
Matt: There have been really great reviews and really shit ones, is kind of really good to have that divided opinion. There’s nothing worse than everyone being like’ yeah, it’s okay’. If you’re gonna hate it, then fucking hate it.
Nicole: I would rather someone hate our album than had a mediocre opinion about it.
Different words and genres are used to describe your sound, how would you describe it?
Harmony: Well I think a major reason why so many people have different genres is because we’ve always kind of…well it’s changed. We may have started off more electronic based but then we started bringing in the live element, then we got really excited about guitars, so played more guitars. So I think it will keep changing.
Nicole: It would make our lives so much easier when friends are like “oh, you’re in a band, what kind of music do you play?”.
Matt: I think someone said it was like Depeche Mode and The Pixies.
Nicole: That was a really complimentary one!
What’s the inspiration behind your music?
Matt: I think that was a good analogy the Depeche Mode and The Pixies thing because there is a lot of heavy electronic influences but then also a raw rock kinda stuff that we are all fans of.
Nicole: I think most of the stuff we are influenced by can be just how we are feeling at the time. Someone may be like ‘Oh my god I just got this drum machine, it’s awesome, let’s go play with it’ or ‘oh my god the new Pixies EP is terrible, let’s write a song that makes us feel better about it’.
Harmony: Our influences definitely change. We’ve all grown up with different music as well along the way. We’re constantly introducing each other to new music, which has an influence on how we write.
How important is it for you guys to experiment with new sounds?
Paul: I think one of the things we are trying to do is to try and bring Electronica into the sound where it is more of a live band set-up. We spend a lot of time making noises and sounds so if we find something we really like and we really want to use it, we find a way to incorporate that into a live set.
Nicole: We’re experimenting because I think we are trying to find that balance. We really like electronic music but we really like bands as well, so how do we do both at the same time without adding another member?
How did you guys come up with the name?
Nicole: It took us months! We basically kept writing down all the names and sending them to our friends and texting and sending out emails with a long list of like 50 different names.
Paul: We basically got all our friends to contribute ideas, we probably had a list of about 300-400 names. I think Vuvuvultures was the one we could all agree on. You type it in to Google and nothing came up, so now we know that everything that does come up is like we own it, it’s ours!
Any close contenders?
Nicole: Energy Snake was actually a pretty close one.
Which is what you’ve called the record label…
Nicole: Purity Conference?
Matt: That was never close though! We were never gonna go through with it!
Nicole: Then we had Meat, H-T-M-Elvis, Four Wars.
Paul: J-Pegasus.
Nicole: I’m really glad we didn’t go with that one! Actually our first ever blog on Tumblr has a list of them, so if you’re ever really bored…
Matt: It’s also divided opinion because some people are like wow! what a great name, others are like that is the shittest name ever.
Nicole: We wanted it to be a made up word, that’s one thing we wanted it to be. It also fucks your brain a bit when you’re trying to text it or write it, you lose track of how many vu’s you write.
Also the three V’s make your bands symbol now…
Harmony: Yeah with the logo, the one thing we said we didn’t want was triangles.
Nicole: And now we have 3 of them!
Vuvuvultures will be playing at Hoxton Bar & Kitchen on 28th November.
For more information on Vuvuvultures visit:
www.vuvuvultures.com
https://www.facebook.com/vuvuvultures
@vuvuvultures
