Shameless Tuesdays: Livre 151 | Crash Harmony
If there's one thing Crash Harmony teaches us, it's that it's never too late to get the band back together. Originally forming in 1986 at Yale University, the indie rock quartet's life span was cut short after two years of playing together. Since that time, the members have gone to form other bands, including Gramercy Arms and The Anderson Council. But that harmony was still hitting those guys' ears, until they realized that they couldn't ignore it anymore.
So in 2022, 36 years since they last played together, Crash Harmony went into the studio, and finally emerged with their debut album: No One Asked for This. The title may be tongue-in-cheek, but their sound certainly isn't! A throwback to 90s rock a la Gin Blossoms and early Barenaked Ladies, Crash Harmony deliver melodies that wouldn't feel out of place in a Central Perk coffeehouse or a classic Kevin Smith film. Fortunately, it won't take them 36 years to come up with a Shameless Tuesdays playlist, but it does come with bands that you'd only be able to discover in old college rags and local music magazines.
Here's what Crash Harmony have to say about this week's playlist:
For our playlist we chose a bunch of songs that inspired us when we started playing together as a band in the mid-80s–in that strange and wonderful time between post-punk, new wave, alternative, and indie.
The act of discovering music was different then. There was no internet; streaming services didn’t exist. We heard most of these songs for the first time on college radio. Sometimes we read about the bands in publications like Spin, Nadine, The New Haven Advocate, the Village Voice, Forced Exposure, or the occasional xeroxed, self-published fanzine. If we were lucky we saw these bands at the Grotto, Toad’s Plac. Sometimes we saw their video on 120 Minutes. There were no social platforms but offline real-world social networks made up of people who were equally obsessed with music and who shared recommendations through word of mouth. We spent hours in independent records stores flipping through stacks of new releases and combing through cut-out bins in search of new music and oldl(er) music newly discovered.
These are some of the songs that meant everything to us in those days. We covered or at least tried to cover a lot of these songs during beer-infused nights in rehearsal rooms when we were trying to figure out who we were and who we wanted to be.
For more information on Crash Harmony, visit their official website, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Check out their debut album No One Asked for This below via their Bandcamp!
Promotional consideration provided by Shameless Promotion PR.
