The Royalty Network

	"VHS or BETA" “Early on, I asked myself ‘Do I want to make records for one group of people, or do I want to write songs for the world?’” That was the question that haunted Craig Pfunder, guitarist, vocalist and primary songwriter for VHS OR BETA, during the creation of the band’s latest album. One listen to the ambitious, yet almost defiantly catchy, material on Bring On The Comets… proves once and for all that, in this case, the world won. Then again, with each successive release VHS OR BETA can always be depended on to break stylistic boundaries. With Bring On The Comets, however, the group Blender heralded as one of rock’s “Best New Bands” and Rolling Stone named an “Artist to Watch” made its boldest moves yet. “Through the course of being a band we’ve experimented with a lot of different sounds,” Pfunder explains. “But this record is about making a statement as far as us freeing ourselves from any musical history we’ve had in our past.”
Formed in 1997 in the indie-rock hotbed that is Louisville, Kentucky (home to indie legends like. Squirrel Bait to Slint), VHS OR BETA—today a trio comprising core members Pfunder, bassist Mark Palgy and drummer Mark Guidry—initially began via an obsession with the indie noise-rock of the late-‘90s era. “Skin Graft records, West Coast noise, the Northeast thing with bands like Arab On Radar, the Chicago thing with U.S. Maple, Japanese noisecore like Melt Banana, and of course Sonic Youth,” Craig notes, listing their nascent influences. Soon enough, the band, always on the lookout for vital sounds, began mutating its sonics towards an electronic/organic groove hybrid. “The reviews then called us ‘Kraftwerk meets Gang of Four,’” he laughs. “I mean, every band sounds like that now.” VHS OR BETA’s breakthrough 2002 release, the Le Funk e.p., proved equally ahead of its time—Daft Punk-style French disco-house channeled via a hungry live-instrument attack. Meanwhile, their acclaimed next effort, the 2004 album Night On Fire, vividly infused club rhythms with ‘80s-style hookcraft a la Depeche Mode and Echo and the Bunnymen before anyone had ever heard of The Killers. “We’re always either a few years ahead of the curve for the trends, or too late,” Pfunder jokes.
With Bring On The Comets, however, VHS OR BETA proved right on time: instead of being pinned to a specific genre or era, it captured instead a populist sensibility all its own. “We really focused on songwriting—on creating pop songs in a time when pop has been watered down,” Pfunder says. It’s the most profound statement we’ve done as a band.” Recorded along with up-and-coming producer Brandon Mason (renowned for producing and/or engineering acts spanning Secret Machines to David Bowie), Comets… provided heartfelt anthems sans arena fromage, driven by rhythms supple enough for a dancefloor yet driving enough for a rock club. Comets… is, not coincidentally, the first time drummer Guidry primarily played a standard, acoustic drum set in lieu of electronic percussion. As well, VHS OR BETA’s famously taut instrumental interplay proved even more explosive after the band completed numerous tours supporting the likes of the Faint, the Scissor Sisters, Doves, the Bravery and Duran Duran, as well as triumphant festival dates spanning Lollapalooza to Reading to Belgium’s Pukkelpop and an electrifying set at this year’s Coachella.
The next-level results on Comets… demonstrated VHS OR BETA’s new aspirations in both sonics and lyrics. “I asked the band early on does this scare you? But this is music—it’s about expression,” Pfunder explains. “It’s just a small personal statement about what is going on in the world. Defiance, loss of love and life—those are just themes percolating constantly all around us today. I mean, if we all went down in a hail of comets, that could be a beautiful thing in a weird way.”
VHS OR BETA still haven’t forgotten their DJ-driven beginnings, with a revitalized, expanded attack, the band found a new life spinning outside the disco ball they couldn’t ignore. “I didn’t want to be a band that just had a dance-club hit, and the album proved that was not the case,” Pfunder says. “Our love of and background in dance music is so strong, but we switched gears and let the band be the band. We haven’t abandoned our roots—we’ve just opened our minds to new things. There’s a fine line between trendy and timeless: I wanted to write a record that people would dance to, but also crosses generations.”
The Royalty Network has had considerable success in music placements within TV, Film Advertising and Computer Games. The music has been used in TV shows ‘Kyle X/Y’, MTV’s ‘Life of Ryan’, ‘Late Night with Conan O’Brien’, Chrysler TV campaign, video game “Audition”, Sk8 Life (an independent film), and Edge Music Vodcast.
With 3 albums, International Touring, Sync placements and nearly 600,000 views and 750,000 plays on Myspace, VHS or BETA is clearly on the way to accomplishing exactly what they’ve set out to do.