Crash Harmony - No One Asked for This
NYC indie rock outfit Crash Harmony presents their debut record 'No One Asked For This', released via New Jersey's Magic Door Record Label. After a 30+ year hiatus, the quartet are back with a full-length album of 10 songs and video for 'Orange Background', which Nils Nadeau describes as "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", following the earlier-released video for '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.
Mixed and mastered by Ray Ketchem (Guided by Voices, Elk City, Gramercy Arms, Luna) at Magic Door Recording in Montclair, NJ, this album was recorded by Ketchem and Dave Derby in NYC, and produced by Ketchem together with Crash Harmony.
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.
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.
On October 18, 'No One Asked for This' will be released on vinyl and digitally everywhere, including Apple Music and Spotify. In all formats, it can be ordered directly from the label via Bandcamp.
