Crash Harmony - Orange Background
NYC indie rock outfit Crash Harmony presents 'Orange Background', the second taste of the band's debut record 'No One Asked For This'. Slated for release via Magic Door Record Label after a 30+ year hiatus, the quartet are back with a full-length album of 10 songs, for which they worked with celebrated producer Ray Ketchem (Guided by Voices, Elk City, Gramercy Arms, Luna) at Magic Door Recording in Montclair, NJ. Earlier, the band released the lead track 'Velour Goddess'.
Crash Harmony is made up of Dave Derby (vocals, guitars), Mike Potenza (guitars, keyboards, vocals), Jon Nighswander (bass, vocals), and Nils Nadeau (drums, percussion, vocals). Formed in 1986 at Yale University in New Haven, CT, the band played its last gig in May 1988 and hadn’t played together again until beginning to record this album in 2022.
"This is one of our earliest songs. I always thought it had a kind of feeling that is reminiscent and wistful; we tried to evoke that feeling with ebow guitar parts," says Mike Potenza.
Nils Nadeau elaborates, "'Orange Background' is a letter from our college selves to our grown selves and also, in a way, from Generation X to what we have now in the world. It’s also the only one, played back, that might have made me wet-eyed for a minute".
Yale rock - an oxymoron too good to be dismissed, meeting as undergraduates swept up in the current of something more exciting than college – a New Haven music scene that was real. While college was for figuring out what you wanted to be, college rock was for figuring out what you wanted to sound like. Crash Harmony was absorbing everything, and trying it all on for size at house parties, frat houses, and clubs throughout New England.
Dave went on to The Dambuilders (and then Gramercy Arms), Mike served on The Anderson Council, Jon left for Europe, and Nils wandered north. But no matter where they went, Crash Harmony still kind of mattered. Eventually, they had to come back. They had to return to that place so, decades later, Crash Harmony reformed to make a new record of old songs - a rock-and-roll reenactment of the New Haven scene that changed them forever.
Like their name, the record is an orchestrated pileup of long-ago influences that collided in the chambers of their broken young hearts and have again wriggled free from their throats and amps, pop gems humming like cicadas and dancing for the pure joy of being alive again.
"Dave and I initially bonded over anglophilia, including a shared love of The Jam, cockney slang and alcohol. I came out of the New Hampshire punk scene and was a founding member of Five Balls of Power (other members went on to join such bands as Dropkick Murphys, Scissorfight and the Radicts). Dave and Nils both were willing to play around with different styles and a level of musicianship that was a notch above the average college band," says Jon Nighswander.
Dave Derby adds, "Nils and I had been in a successful indie pop band. I wanted to create something that was both heavier and more psychedelic in that 80s college radio Paisley Underground sort of way, but then we recalibrated towards more of a 70s vibe. We tried really early on to align ourselves with the New Haven scene and not just the Yale one."
If you were fortunate enough to ever be part of a vibrant music scene, then you know how intoxicating, how important, how finally cool you felt to live on this newly discovered planet. It was pulsing with energy and possibility, teeming with talent and artists and then, the jaw drop of realizing your planet was actually part of an entire galaxy of scenes vibrating around the country. A truth revealed that rock legends were not just the leather-pantsed strutters on the national stage but dishwashing oddballs strumming in your neighbor's backyard - heroes you could actually meet, try to impress, emulate and maybe one day open for, if dreams could come true. And, for Crash Harmony, they did for a while.
For these musical dreamers, it’s all so clear now – how lucky they were to have been part of a scene and to have met and grown up in ideal conditions to make music that would somehow find a way to live forever... Everybody, kiss your ghost.
As of September 18, 'Orange Background' will be available exclusively via Bandcamp and officially released everywhere else, including Apple Music and Spotify on September 24. The full album 'No One Asked for This' (out October 18 on vinyl or digitally) can already be pre-ordered via Bandcamp.
