“Chin Ho! are one of the great what-ifs of Vermont music history.”
Formed by college friends Andrew X Smith and David Morency in 1989, the band Seven Days Newspaper called “Vermont indie rock royalty” kept their shoulder to the grindstone for over 15 years, becoming “perhaps the closest Vermont ever came to making a splash in the alternative-rock boom of the 1990s.” (Seven Days)
But eventually, after 8 self-produced albums and EPs, 20 members, 27 lineup changes, 1000 shows, almost 100 compilation CDs, 10 years as an officially sponsored Jagermeister band, 400k miles on two Dodge 1500 Ram vans, the band called Chin Ho! quietly disappeared in the early 2000s.
Morency and Smith saw each other once in the next 20 years.
Then in 2023, a planned documentary brought six of the band members back together for a sold-out reunion concert at Vermont’s Higher Ground. Spirits were high and the band’s back catalog was added to streaming services. The film never materialized, but along the way Smith asked two-time Chin Ho! guitarist-turned-songwriter/producer Jason “Halogen” Dunn to listen to an unfinished demo called “To Describe This Girl”.
According to Dunn: “Andrew sent me this tune, asking what I thought it needed. I added a bunch of stuff and sent it back like “I dunno, maybe this?” and he was so psyched that he released it online the next day. Then he sent over “Dinner At Daily Planet” and the same thing happened. Eventually, he just straight up asked if I wanted to produce a new album from their 30 or 40 unreleased tracks. It seemed ridiculous and impossible so I immediately said yes, as long as Dave was on it and it was a real Chin Ho! album.”
So began a year-long process of gathering demos from old cassette tapes, with Dunn deconstructing and reconstructing each tune until the band came together back home in Vermont to record 14 songs’ worth of basic tracks with engineer Joe Egan, who had produced Ho! as well as Dunn’s band The Halogens back in the 90’s, keeping the whole thing strictly a family affair.
“Labor of love or not,” recalls Dunn, “it had to be the best-sounding thing I’d ever done, and I wanted it to be the best-sounding Ho! Record period. I spent every free moment of 2024 just hammering away at it until I felt like we’d gotten there. We were all proud of the record but man, was it a shock to be picked up by Pacific two and a half decades after the last EP came out.”
The result is The Mystery of the Curse of the Chin Ho! Mystery Curse, an album 25 years in the making, created from songs and pieces of songs dating from 1990’s “So Sick of Chicago” through 2024’s Smith/Dunn collaboration on “Stay Home Sick”. A labor of love. A family affair. An impossible feat in the face of fate.
And Dave’s on it.
