May 2010 The Stool Pigeon
9
Harlem are quickly earning a name for themselves as party animals. Not that they care. “Well, fuck!” bellows Curtis O’Mara. “Congratulations to us for being the most fucked-up band possible!” Although these garage brats signed with Matador last year, O’Mara decided to keep his job as a chef, just to preserve his sanity between tours. “Right now it helps me be normal. If I’m out on the road doing crazy shit, it’s good to do something simpler so I don’t have that desperate anxiety that comes without a linear day-to-day life.” Asked to elaborate on the crazy shit, O’Mara has no shortage of dope stories. “I was convinced I was trapped inside a cheeseburger. I ended up having a voodoo wedding ceremony in it with some girl I met.” Bandmate Michael Coomers, meanwhile, was increasingly pre-occupied with the cloud he noticed creeping behind him all day. “Fuck! My mom’s gonna read this and then it’s going to be all over,” he says. “She’s already read enough stuff that makes me look like the worst kid she could’ve possibly had. Although, the other day, she said, ‘You’ve turned into less of a fuck-up than I thought you would.’” The mischief began when O’Mara and Coomers hung out together as teens in Tucson, Arizona. “We terrorised everybody,” says O’Mara. “We’d drive around, run over garbage cans, pee on our friends, throw beer bottles. We took it there.” They formed various punk bands, like Teen Suicide and Smart Pussy, each one spurred by the volatile dynamic developing between them. “Sometimes we come at each other like, ‘I can’t stand you!’” says Coomers, slightly disconcerted that he’s just found a heart with a swastika painted on the back of his van. “It’s definitely got all the trappings of any good friendship. Curtis used to refer to me as being the mother and, at first, I didn’t like that. But
Words by Cian Traynor Photo by Pooneh Ghana
In their nightmares, garage trio HARLEM get trapped inside cheeseburgers, and their ultimate band would feature a talking dog.
Fast Food High
International news then I realised that mom’s the one who does all the work and dad just puts on an apron and says, ‘I’m makin’ hamburgers tonight!’ So, yeah — fuck dads, man. They’re the worst.” They went their separate ways after school, with Coomers drifting from town to town as a couch-surfing stoner, getting fired from every job he’s ever had and either growing bored or wearing out his welcome in the process. His fascination with “witchy” places drew him to various haunted tourist traps, like the sites of Jack the Ripper’s murders in London, totting up plenty of ghostly encounters along the way. “A little girl came to the bottom of my bed once after a shooting in Oakland,” he says between drags. “She told me to close the window and lock it. That one was really fucked up. Then I went to this house in North Carolina where somebody killed themselves in the bathroom. Though I didn’t know that, when I walked in I thought somebody was behind the shower curtain and pulled it back. So I went downstairs and told my friends, ‘You have a ghost up there!’ They all got bummed out ’cause that was their friend who died.” The pair eventually reunited in 2007 to start a new band where they could alternate between guitar, drums and vocals. They couldn’t afford to tour so they’d sublet roach-infested shacks between cities, picking up bassist Jose Boyer after finally settling in Austin, Texas. Armed with belting hooks and the effortless swagger of vintage R&B, their bombast erupted into 2009’s selfreleased Free Drugs ;-) and took shape with its acerbic follow-up, Hippies. But Coomers is keen to distance their sound from obvious reference-points, like the seminal 1972 garage compilation Nuggets, and bristles at any mention of ‘lo-fi’: “I’ve no idea what that fucking means. Low fidelity? Does it sound like a crappy stereo? Have you ever seen a record player that says ‘lo-fi’? You want to come listen to something on my lo-fi stereo?”
Indeed, he’s been stuck with that label since he began making music and insists that while others actively pursue the aesthetic of shoddy recordings, Harlem simply aren’t talented enough to accomplish anything else. He’s equally modest when it comes to their live show. “Honestly I think there’s far more interesting stuff on TV. Like... like... like... like... do you know how many advances have been made in TV and how few have been made in music? It’s insane. They have dogs talking and it looks like the dog is actually talking. We can’t do that. We stand there with some archaic instrument acting like we just did a magic trick. If that talking dog was in a band, that’d be entertainment. Even if the dog was just the manager hanging out back or one of the band members’ girlfriends saying, [in squeaky voice] ‘You’re doin’ great, honey!’ I’d be like, ‘This is the best band I’ve ever seen!’” Coomers is classic frontman material. He’s outspoken, funny, intelligent and temperamental, generating priceless quotes at every turn [“I’m pretty convinced the brain’s just some bullshit that’s a red herring”]. By contrast, O’Mara tears through his points with blunt force. Yet he gushes about discovering Nirvana while blasting a mixtape as a drunken teen, citing the lasting impacting it’s had on him. Recently the band’s growing taste for debauchery has made him reconsider that influence in another light. “I didn’t think it was an issue until people were like, ‘Hey man, some pretty hardy partyin’ you got goin’ on there.’ I guess sometimes you get swept away. I just love playing music. If I can keep that, I won’t be so suicidal.” When asked if he sees himself burning out or rocking on until he’s senile, O’Mara turns gravely serious. “That’s a scary question. I think about it a lot. I’m not sure which one I’d be most satisfied with. I can’t tell. I just want to be remembered as a nice guy with a pretty face.”