Flying Vipers are a favorite amongst the Rootfire team. We first covered them when I interviewed brothers Marc and John Beaudette for a Vinyl Giveaway article with Rootfire raffling off three copies of their Cuttings LP in October 2020.  It’s worth pointing out that the three copies, rather than any other quantity, was a strategic choice in reverence to the Vipers’ “holy trinity of plants,” i.e. ganja, coffee and hops. The title of their album, of course, referred not only to this favorite vegetation but also to the cutting of tape, an essential part of their throwback production process.

We next covered this Boston-area group in March of 2022, when my friend and Rootfire colleague, Jim the Boss, authored an Album Showcase article for their vinyl release of Green & Copper: The First Two Tapes. That LP combined the Vipers first two albums which had been originally released on cassette tapes. I highly recommend revisiting these two articles for some interesting backstory on the Beaudette twins and their uncommon approach to making music.

To use appropriate vernacular, fast forwarding to 2025, the reggae community finds this uber-interesting outfit dropping a new album, Off World.  This dubby reggae gem with a retro feel encompasses two exciting changes for the band.

First, after previously releasing music independently on cassette tapes and then working with Jump Up Records to issue their prior two albums, the band partnered with Easy Star Records for this release. While this alliance may be new, the connection between John Beaudette (aka JBo) and Easy Star goes back twenty years via the Easy Star All-Stars, the reggae collective originally formed by the label founders to serve as their studio band, when Beaudette had booked the group while attending college. This led to the Beaudettes’ post-punk/reggae/dub/pysch-rock/prog-rock mashup, Destroy Babylon, doing some tours with the All-Stars throughout the years. According to JBo, however, there wasn’t much connection with Easy Star Records outside of the gigs.

Photo credit: Lara Woolfson

“We never made much of an effort to ‘shop’ our music around to try to get signed or anything like that,” JBo explained. “Working with Jump Up was cool – Chuck Wren kept it really simple and assisted with pressing and distributing vinyl, but we still did everything else. When we finished Off World, we shared it with Easy Star Records just on a whim, and they gave us really positive feedback and said if we didn’t mind sitting on it a little longer, they’d be down to work with us. While it’s still a very DIY effort, having Easy Star help us with many aspects of releasing the album has been really wonderful. It’s crazy that we’re on the same roster as artists like Protege, Jesse Royal, and Mortimer because we’re so different from them, but Easy Star are great at working with and supporting different types of reggae sounds from all over the globe.”

The second change for Flying Vipers marked by the release of Off World is that, after a series of instrumental dub albums, the Vipers latest offering features vocals for the first time with the inclusion of the soulful singing of Kellee Webb. According to JBo, they had long considered adding this element. “We thought about possible vocalists from the very beginning of the band,” he revealed, citing that a couple songs from the Green Tape [2015] have vocal demos. “But it just never happened. Kellee Webb was singing with Destroy Babylon at that time, so, at first, we thought we’d find someone different just so it wasn’t too much like DB. Kellee moved down south in 2017, and it wasn’t until she moved back in 2021 and DB was on a hiatus that we thought it made total sense for Kellee to start singing with Vipers.”

Webb comes from a diverse musical background dating all the way back to elementary school, and has worked with the Beaudettes for many years. “There was always music playing in my home, from reggae, rock and jazz to country and R&B,” she recalled. “My parents were active in the D.C. Blues Society, so I got to see them participating in jam sessions on guitar or vocals around the same time I was learning to play guitar because of my new love of alt-rock. Once I got to play bass for the first time, I knew that was the instrument for me.”

She then spent her high school years playing bass in surf and rock bands, playing guitar and singing in the East Tennessee State University Bluegrass Band and falling in love with old school ska. She attended Berklee College of Music to play bass, while continuing to sing and learning to play the drum kit, congas, timbales, and other percussive instruments. “Writing my own compositions, I was a singer-songwriter who played bass in rock and metal bands for a while before becoming a frontwoman for rock groups. I met John when we were both working at the same arts school in Waltham and we enjoyed each other’s music. When backing vocals were needed for Destroy Babylon, he asked me if I would be interested. I jumped at the opportunity because DB was my favorite band at that time.”

The collaborations between JBo and Kellee Webb took a brief hiatus when Webb moved from Massachusetts to Maryland, where she started singing with The Soularites, a Baltimore-based ska/reggae band.  “I loved the vibe, creativity and the rare opportunity to share the stage with Colleen (Curran, The Soularites lead vocalist.) The world is so tiny, we later realized we had been in the same elementary school class and attended the same YMCA when we were kids!  After expanding my musical horizons with them and riding out the pandemic, I returned to Massachusetts and asked JBo if he had any musical projects that needed vocals.  He asked if I’d be willing to sing some Flying Vipers tunes, and I’ve been working with everyone ever since.”

While Flying Vipers’ bread and butter of dubwise reggae has been lauded over the years, Webb’s singing ushers the band into a new chapter. Not only does she add another welcomed sonic element, but she provides the opportunity for Flying Vipers to add deeper meaning to their music through lyrics. To that end, amongst the nine tracks that comprise Off World, a theme emerges: fight or flight as a response to the darkening reality of contemporary society.

Voicing the “fight” response, “Believers and Deceivers” speaks to how people, perhaps even willingly, allow themselves to be misled by false narratives, fake news and empty promises:

Believers only will hear

What they wanna hear

Believers only will see

What they wanna see

Believers only will know

What they have been told

Subtle echoes give Webb’s at times powerful and other times intimate vocals a dreamy feel, and together with the typical dub elements of reverb and delay give this tune a properly haunting vibe.

Deceivers only will say

What they want you to hear

Deceivers only will show

What they want you to see

Deceivers only will tell

What they want you to know

And when the deed is done

They’re never to blame

Another track that embraces the “fight” response, “Jackals,” voices a rallying cry to stand against the greed and corruption that has constantly plagued our society and seems to be only getting worse.

Jackals come in the night

We gather around and fight them off

When they come in the day

Our numbers will make them balk

Our spirit never fades,

We’re fighting every day

No, we will never die

On this you can rely, y’all

They keep growling their lies

But the truth will not die, interred

Jackals think they have won

Facts will not be outdone, no sir

Did Flying Vipers’ new direction, which allows their music to carry lyrical weight, provide a needed catharsis?  “Sadly, it’s a lot of the same shit we’ve been singing about since the very beginning of Destroy Babylon in 2001, just a slightly different context,” JBo explained. “When Vipers first started, we really enjoyed being instrumental. DB was our outlet for music with a message and was purposely outspoken politically, and that was indeed cathartic. It was refreshing to have Vipers be a little lighter and not confrontational. But, of course, when we all started writing lyrics, it just naturally revolved around our current environment; politically and emotionally, and with a foreboding sense of fight or flight.”

Webb added, “I hope our listeners exercise the freedom to interpret our lyrics however they need to get through the challenges of our modern era. The trials and tribulations keep coming, but if we support each other we’ll continue to thrive.”

Another standout track, “Make Ah Move,” features the incomparable dancehall sensation, Ranking Joe, who’s trademark toasting makes the song bump. While he brings a completely different vocal element than Webb, his lyrics maintain the album’s narrative as he laments today’s society and yearns to escape:

Get up every day and mi say too much dealing

And get up every day and fussing and fighting

Get up every day and too much war and crime

Crying and crying, crying for peace

Peace and love is what want (bong diddly)

Peace and love is what we chant (bong diddly diddly)

Got to make a move, and got to make a, mi say positive move

(yeah, ya know)

I feel like leaving Earth, yeah

And move out to space

Mi say Jupiter or Mars

Where there is no tribal war (bong diddly diddly)

JBo explained how this exciting collaboration came about: “Years ago, we did a track with Johnny Clarke, which was a dream, so for this album, we thought it would be a fresh alternative for Vipers to feature a deejay from JA. Our longtime friend, Billy “Prince Polo” Szeflinski (of The Cool & Deadly) did some sessions with Ranking Joe in the past, so he hooked me up with Joe’s number and I called him up. We ended up having a great long conversation about music and life. At that point we had the album title and a lot of the lyrics done, so I just told him what the basic themes were and he took it from there. He crushed it!”

Photo credit: Lara Woolfson

Another welcomed element that came along with Kellee Webb and Ranking Joe’s vocals was the addition of harmony singers on “Show Me” and “Believers and Deceivers” performed by JBo along with guests Garth Streete and Kemar McCarthy. “Vipers played a reggae fest in Salem, MA, a couple years ago and we shared the stage with a band from New Hampshire called Redemption (now stylized as RDMTION),” JBo divulged about how he linked with these two talented singers. “Their set was all covers but I thought the vocals from the harmony trio were really good. Garth, one of the singers, took some photos of our band and we kept in touch. At this point, I had recorded my own backing vocals already on the new songs but wanted something better. I invited them down to the studio in Waltham. Only Garth and Kemar were able to join, but it worked out well. They grew up in Jamaica and shared some amazing stories of sessions they did with Sly & Robbie and others. It was cool having vocalists from Jamaica in our shitty little basement studio and really dig what we were doing.”

“Show Me,” by the way, which had been the first single off the album, stands out with its soul-tinged vibes, bringing to mind the music put out by Brooklyn’s Daptone Records.  JBo said they weren’t specifically going for that Daptone feel, but he recalls wanting to try to make a song with a vibe close to Willi Williams’ version of “No One Can Stop Us.” They didn’t “get there,” he humbly conceded, but said that it served as a good guidance track.

 In addition to six original compositions, Off World includes three covers that all share a common motif of outer space which tie into the album title and overarching theme of being disgruntled with our society and leaving it behind.

The first of these, “No One Wants an Alien,” is a song about alienation from Wipers, who are considered to be the first punk band from the Pacific Northwest and reportedly had heavily influenced Kurt Cobain.  The second cover is the theme from the cult-classic animated film, La Planète Sauvage, an instrumental interlude that perfectly centers the first four and last four tracks. The song kicks off with the gentle, ethereal strings of acclaimed jazz harpist, Brandee Younger, before devolving into a cacophony of organ and drums. This gives way to a sax-forward reggae romp, with the harp’s welcomed return woven throughout the song, giving the sensation of a psilocybin-induced astral projection, drifting above a Jamaican beach. The third cover, “Outer Spaceways, Inc.,” finds the avant-garde jazz of Sun Ra given the dub reggae treatment. Its overdubbed Farfisa transistor organ, Syndrums and heartily-blown baritone saxophone undoubtedly give it an interstellar feel.

Coming from such wide-ranging and disparate sources, it begs the question, were these songs that the Beaudettes had wanted to cover for a long time, or did they strategically seek out songs that would fit within the Off World concept?  “It was mostly a coincidence that all came together, once we started thinking of themes and writing lyrics,” JBo said. “The Wipers thing started as a joke just playing on the band names (Wipers/Vipers.) I tried finding any song from their first three albums, which I love, but none of them worked well in a reggae context – except ‘No One Wants an Alien.’ And I think Kellee singing that song from her own perspective (not as a white dude from the Northwest) really made the song even more interesting to me and shows the power and versatility of good songwriting.”

Continuing, he said that La Planete Sauvage is a soundtrack that gets consistent spins. “I love the film,” he told me. “I actually probably first heard it via Madlib/Quasimoto’s “Come On Feet” – I played The Unseen album constantly when it first came out – and that track, which samples the film’s theme, was a highlight.”

Photo credit: Lara Woolfson

As for the Sun Ra cover, JBo revealed, “Before the Off World sessions, Marc and I recorded a handful of covers just for fun. One of them was Sun Ra’s ‘Twin Stars of Thence,’ but we never did anything with it. The riddim that became ‘Outer Spaceways, Inc.’ was not meant to be that song at all; I recorded a melodica melody over it, and it wasn’t until after I heard it back that I realized I stole the melody of that song, just reharmonized in its relative minor key… so then we just ran with it!”

For an artist whose music relies so heavily on post-production, and especially one that has previously gone about doing things in such an adventurous way, it seemed appropriate to ask how the production of this album may have differed from previous LPs, whether due to the addition of vocals or some other reason.  JBo, as the tech nerd that he is, (written with deep respect and admiration), graciously went into deep detail: “Jay Champany (of 10 Ft. Ganja Plant) mixed all our previous releases on a Tascam 488 Portastudio (4-track). While he did help engineer the initial Off World sessions with the 488, he kindly bowed out of mixing it. I knew there was no way I was going to be able to work the Tascam like he did, but I figured I’d at least give it a shot before we asked someone else. Once I started working with it, I really fell in love with it…until it broke again. We had a good amount recorded on tape at that point, so I ended up digitizing all of the channels (the roundabout way of accomplishing that is a story unto itself), and then setup a digital console to act exactly like the 488; e.g. only allowing for two auxiliary sends for analog effect units, and doing the final mixes live, like how Jay did it. A mixing engineer doing a dub-heavy live mix is very much a personal performance, so my mixes would never sound like Jay’s, but because we both are obsessed with the same era of Jamaican music, the spirit of the mixes are complimentary (I hope.)”

Expanding on how his approach differs from Champany’s, JBo added: “Jay was really good at cutting out anything that wasn’t vital to the mix, whereas I have a tendency to leave more in for a denser, layered sound. Jay always mixed the Vipers in mono (“in case someone has a broken speaker, they won’t lose any of the music,” he reasoned). I mixed Off World in stereo, though I kept it a tight stereo field. Zack (Brines, who handles the keys for Flying Vipers) played a lot more Fender Rhodes electric piano on this album which really benefits from the stereo tremolo panning effect, as well as his Farfisa organ (as featured in the solo on “Show Me”).

JBo said since they aimed to make the album more vocal-focused, they were also more conscious of arrangements, considering where a potential verse or chorus might fit. This was a shift from their previous sessions, where they were making it up as they went along, often doing only one or two takes.

“For outboard effects, a big part of our sound, the previous albums Jay mainly used our RE-201 Space Echo for tape delay and a Tapco 4400 for spring reverb,” JBo shared. “This time I used those in addition to a Maestro EP-3 Echoplex and the spring reverb was mostly an old Furman RV-1 that I really love, despite it being noisy.”

And regarding percussion, Marc (MBo) chimed in that right after Cuttings came out, they scored a Korg Minipops 7 drum machine – what Aston “Family Man” Barrett used on a bunch of songs, like “Cobra Style” – and they featured that drum machine on “No One Wants an Alien” and “Outer Spaceways, Inc.”

Finally, JBo mentioned one other element influenced the production of this record. Previously, the holy trinity of the Vipers’ session fuel was coffee, beer, and cannabis, but this time around, another special form of vegetation impacted his late-night mixing sessions. “Without incriminating myself too much, magic mushrooms came back into my arsenal,” he revealed, adding that he had used them regularly in his late teens, but very rarely since then, until the later stages of the pandemic called for an escape.

As for how to listen to this otherworldly collection of reggae music, while Off World can be streamed in all the typical places, record collectors will want to pounce on the limited edition pressing of “astro-clash” colored vinyls. These can only be bought via Bandcamp, their official website or at a Vipers show.

And of course, the production of 33s means that the impact of the album art is greatly elevated. For the task of designing their cover, Flying Vipers recruited artist, Jaime Zuverza. “We commissioned Jaime to do the cover art for Cuttings after we saw his work online, especially the album art he’s done for the label, Astral Spirits, MBo shared. “We loved how that came together, so we wanted to work with him again for Off World. While Cuttings was intentionally a monochromatic print, we wanted to inject a few more colors this time, using La Planete Sauvage animation as a heavy reference point for the direction. Jaime’s initial pieces for this LP were paintings, but as we refined the concept, it ended up being a digital piece – which is actually quite reflective of the recording processes, starting analog and finishing digitally.”

Flying Vipers will be playing a limited string of dates throughout the Northeast this spring.