Transplanted from Tucson to Austin, the band Harlem are clearly accustomed to high temperatures. Every song of theirs burns bright, blending sordid premises, drunken technique, and the exploded sounds of dive-bar rock'n'roll. The music is being sold, ironically, under the name Free Drugs;-)-- but don't let the adolescent title and cutesy emoticon steer you away. Part of a noisy new crop of revivalists-- the umpteenth generation of Lenny Kaye acolytes-- Harlem's record nevertheless strikes out as a marvel of cartoonishly masculine, crudely analog brevity.
Reviewers have treated the band's professed love of Nirvana as a half-joke, and given their affectedly dumb deflections of interviewers' questions, it's no wonder. But like most in their generation, Harlem's appreciation of Lead Belly can likely be traced to Kurt Cobain's own love for the bluesman, made famous in his unplugged rendition of "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?" There are not only echoes of Lead Belly's chorus in Harlem's "Red Herring", but hints of Nirvana's noise-pop forebears, Pixies, in the haunting harmonies. Apart from those moody pre- and post-industrial genres, countless others can be spotted: surf rock á la the Ventures, Sun Records rockabilly, and overdriven Detroit proto-punk.
"I'm on Drugs" crams the fractured pace of junkiedom into two minutes. Fuzzy and brief as the altered states they are singing about, the song has the thickened intensity, to use a more family-friendly metaphor, of a slow gravy reduction. Play "Witchgreens" for another instance of the band's inability to waste time: They slap together the bare bones of a pop song, a slinky groove, and a silken shout, and manage to sneak their chorus into your memory. When they demand more room to move, they stretch the track to a relatively epic three minutes in "South of France", giving them the precise acreage needed to quarter an army of crazy rhythms, one slyly submerged melody, and an apocalyptic breakdown worthy of Black Francis.
So is it sincere? Are they trying too hard? It is too soon to tell. What cannot be denied, even at this early stage, is the charm behind Harlem's to-hell-with-everything swagger. In songs like "Beautiful & Very Smart" and "Disneyland", their primitivism extends from sounds to emotions, as they plead sweetly for girls to simply hang around and talk to them. Ultimately, it is hard to judge them against their aesthetic brethren-- Sic Alps, for instance, or the Black Lips-- when chops and studio polish are erased from the equation. Even without clever language or arrangements, their elemental yearning for teenage kicks makes up for that. They may not be adding much to the neo-Nuggets formula, but their channeling of those fuzzed-out relics of rock history is so painstakingly slipshod, so studiedly aggressive, and so exuberantly ominous, that listeners won't give a fig about the lack of novelty.
