Review Summary: Let those bees keep buzzing.
Punk Rock seems like a touchy subject. The Ramones brilliant self titled debut was released in 1976, and while punk rock had seen a massive flourish overseas in the UK and a decade earlier in Detroit, over the past thirty plus years that album and its eternal hooks (Blitzkrieg bop!) and effervescent sense of kitsch have become a staple of modern rock music. Not to mention that album pretty much made it ok to write tunes in nothing but power chord progressions, spawning droves and droves of young “punks” looking to get their message across with a few notes, some hooks, and a whole lot of Laissez-faire vocals. While the genre as a whole has grown and branched off from its initial (loud)humble beginnings, there’s still something to be said for the classic punks. The Stooges’ lighting riffs and Iggy’s fiery delivery, the powder keg psychedelic rock of the MC5, the ska infused political upheaval of The Clash and the aforementioned pop savvy Joey & Co. Hell even the overtly calculated cries of “Anarchy In The UK.” have their moments. Point is the Austin by way of Arizona trio Harlem really wish they were all these bands. Or at least they seem like they would fit nicely right beside the greats of the early punk rock movement. Question just becomes then:
Would they have made it? Probably not.
Armed with jangly yet bouncy riffs a’la The Ramones and the MC5’s distinct penchant for any and everything
far out man, their Matador debut
Hippies is an aptly titled first
real try at it for the band. But in the end, what hinders the album is how much of a
promising debut it sounds like, never reaching past the borders of ‘lo-fi’ seemingly pleased with just remaining inside the genre confines. Abusing the production with an overabundance of fuzz and reverb wash,
Hippies proves that Harlem certainly may be trying, and that they are most definitely capable, but sadly the LP falls short of being more than a few good songs amongst mostly (good)filler.
On the one hand, it seems almost counterintuitive to even begin dissecting this album for the sake of
critical appraisal, it almost feels like you’d be trying too hard to find something here.
Hippies as it stands is a record that has no great ambition, no grand scope, it is for all intensive purposes there to look pretty, maybe play in the background, provide a little toe-tappage here and there -- and by all means it does. The real issue is though, no matter how much they might try (and try they might!) to give us sixteen sugary sweet jangly pop tunes in roughly forty minutes,
Hippie’s songs just tend to run together. The track listing as a whole is basically just “Be Your Baby,” “Gay Human Bones,” “Prairie My Heart,” “Pissed” and all the stuff in between that just kind of sounds like crappier versions of those songs. Basically they stick to one (overplayed) shtick: fuzzed out, classic punk infused, jangle rock with a serious love for surf riffs and washed out vocals. Comparatively to the multitudes of other people trying to do just this exact same type of half-uninspired rock n’ roll, Harlem are leagues above the rest(live). They just don’t really do anything to differentiate themselves from the leaders of the pack, falling head first into the pit of voices in the crowd.
Potential is a word thrown around without much thought now-a-days, but the word is not wasted on Harlem -- they have it in droves. Now if they could just do more than produce an album filled with 90% run-of-the-mill jangle-punk songs, no longer than three minutes and deliver on all the praise and hype this “buzz band” have accrued over their last few months. Really though, if they never amount to anything more, at least they do this semi-well, or for their benefit,
better than the other people shooting for a multi-album Matador deal; which is
really what matters.
