The cover of Technicolor Health, the debut full-length from New York's Harlem Shakes, depicts a rainbow over a desolate city street in a serious state of disrepair. Power lines wilt, trees teeter, telephone poles tilt, and chunks of broken down buildings spill onto the sidewalks. But has the rainbow beam come to the rescue, or is it responsible for the destruction? No doubt the Shakes, with their brand of today's fashionable guitar pop sounds-- a fusion of folk, global-pop, and good ol' fashioned indie rock-- mean to project the former interpretation. The music exudes a kind of clear-eyed optimism that can only come from seeing the worst but looking forward to the best, and indeed the band has acknowledged hearkening back to the hearty, happy (or at least happier) days of the early 1990s, not in terms of the music but in terms of the national everything-is-still-possible mood.
On the other hand, anyone put off by the group's privileged nostalgia and self-consciously upbeat lyrics might imagine the cover's rainbow canopy as a multi-hued harbinger of doom, announcing yet another smug Brooklyn band with a savvy appreciation of someone's big brother's hip record collection and a smart way of appropriating and assimilating it into a catchy enough but far from guileless confection. Surely it takes some degree of suspension of disbelief to buy "Sunlight", the band's doe-eyed tribute to having a good time, draped as it is with bright keyboards and horns, or "Strictly Game", which bounces along bubbling synths and Afro-Caribbean rhythms, singer Lexy Benaim declaring hopefully, in his thin, nasally but affable voice, "this will be a better year."
Indeed, were Benaim a stronger singer, he might better understand the importance of serving a little darkness with your light, some subtle irony undercutting the earnestness. But no, he and the Shakes don't even attempt the balancing act and instead stress the pep, which is probably for the best, since an act with any less conviction that the bright way is the right way would have a hard time pulling off the likes of "Unhurried Hearts (Passaic Pastoral)"-- let alone its title-- or "Natural Man", each a broad compression of the recent indie-timeline beginning somewhere around Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and ending more or less contemporaneously with Vampire Weekend.
Fortunately, even if the band's lack of cynicism often veers to the opposite extreme, the Harlem Shakes' handshake-and-smile approach is hard to outright dislike. The Harlem Shakes have their eyes on the prize, and it's sort of charming imagining the group riding that rainbow to the rescue (and greater fame) as self-appointed countermeasures to the menace of malaise. Sunny proselytizers that that they are, the Shakes no doubt see every frown and rain cloud as mere challenges to surmount until the masses are basking in their collective light, but on their door-to-door home-invasion quest they should expect more than a few grouchy "no solicitors" postings. This one included.
