Review of harf.
Mercury Lounge
NYC
3/28/24
My little brother is in town, his first time in NYC. Ahead of his visit I asked him to search around and see if there’s any band playing, theater on, or hard-to-find movies screening that he’d want to check out. I know for a fact that my brother’s tastes diverge from mine quite a bit. I’d asked him, in some way, to show me the City as he’d have it explored.
The one band that came up in his search enough to pique his interest was a singer-songwriter I’ve never heard of: harf.
My brother asked me if I wanted to have a listen before we nabbed our tickets. I declined. His description of ‘Indie sad-guy stuff’ was enough for me to start imagining what all could be in store. To say the show was anything near what I was expecting would be the height of a lie.
harf. (typing this out is gonna drive my word processor aboslutley bonkers) started his set in an orthodox-enough fashion. The previous solo act, Justing Rowland, was drowned out by the audience of college-aged soon-to-be-finance bros. Everyone was there for harf.. Other than the too-occasional scream of “Take your shirt off!!”, everyone behaved for him.
harf.‘s three opening tunes, a twang-inflected coffeeshop rock, played off well enough. But if he’d done the whole set in this format it would’ve worn thin rather quick. Better that a full band joined him. A good band too: deft guitarist, drummer with handfuls of pocket.
The star of the band quickly proved to be the bassist. With a tone like singing rubber, that warm deadness I’ve always associated with ’70s country — The Highwaymen, Glenn Campbell, Willie and Merle — the nostalgia was plenty to carry my attention through a set of music I’d very much otherwise not listen to. Careening between Dave Matthews yacht rock and the aforementioned resurrected sound of the ’70s, harf. was there to party, alienate no one, and keep a tongue firmly planted in the cheek.
Speaking of the ’70s, there must be something going on with younger folks with regards to the sounds of that long boomed-to-bits decade. The first band of the night, a newer group called Analog Transfer, was fucking dripping in it. A full-on five piece band, complete with two guitars and a keyboard. Vocalist singing confidently in a strained upper register a la Robert Plant. Jammy interludes. All the pieces were there to throw us back into a decade none of us remember, but have cultivated a paleontologist’s fascination with by way of, no doubt, our fathers’ dusty CD collections.
“What’d you think of them?” my brother asked when we stepped outside for a post-set breath of drizzly NYC spring air.
“Well, here’s my thing,” I answered, chewing the problem of pastiche and tribute over. “No one is outside of influence; everyone’s aping someone else. But, it’s what you ape and how you ape it. One cannot create a new sound copying the exterior, stylistic gestalt of someone else, because all of that comes from the adding up of much smaller, more particular elements. However, if one can listen deep enough to add the particularities of several different sounds, little bits and bobs borrowed all around, then something original might come into being …”
“So, what did you think of them?”
“They’re great, and they’ll get there.”
