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Artist: Harlem
Hails from: Austin, TX
Musical Style: Indie Rock, Alternative, Garage Rock
For Fans of: Pavement, Wavves, The Kinks, Brian Jonestown Massacre
Unlit Hallway(Live)
Why you should check them out:
Even a cursory run-through of Harlem’s recordings makes plain the band’s love of playing—and listening to—music. The trio rolls through sixteen tracks on Hippies, their second full-length, with each cut a nugget of garage-y rock filled with allusions to 50s girl groups, 60s pop, psychedelia, punk, and just about everything in between.
Background check:
Harlem songs are stripped-down affairs, propelled by raw energy, chiming guitars and expressive vocals. The band traffics in driving rhythms and distorted chords, with most tunes barely pushing more than a couple minutes in length. Oftentimes the fellas sound like they’re in a hurry to run off a cliff, but on Hippies they manage to smartly throw in a few slower-tempo, lovesick numbers to balance things out.
Harlem——Coomers (nee Michael Coomer), Curtis O’Mara and Jose Boyer—started building their following one song at a time with their “Cover of the Month Club,” a long-running project in which the band produces their own loose versions of a wide array of songs from the likes of Devo, 60s girl group The Dixie Cups, Paul Revere and the Raiders—even Detroit techno group Drexciya. They subsequently self-release the 4-track bedroom recordings, offering them up for free on their Myspace page.
Hippies is both a welcome progression from and complement to their debut, Free Drugs 
. The album is due out April 6th on Matador Records.
Where you can find them in cyberspace:
On Tour:
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 at 6:00 am and is filed under Alternative, Alternative Pop/Rock, Alternative/Indie Rock, Indie Rock.
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