Those older sounds, for them, are just a means, never an end unto themselves. And even when those more recent sounds aren’t apparent, they never sound like hacky ’70s-rock revivalists. And then there’s “My Song 5,” which is built on a gut-scraping computerized dubstep fuzz-bass but which never does anything obvious with it. But with HAIM, what matters is the vocals themselves - the way one will take the lead and the other two will answer her parts back, or the ways that the voices will rhythmically push the music around into some unexpected places. The sisters love to talk about R&B girl groups like TLC and Destiny’s Child, and when newer bands talk about those groups, they’re usually using the name-checks as a shorthand to describe a sort of lush digital sensuality. The entire history of ’80s soft-rock radio lives in the emotive synth-dissolve of “Go Slow.” And plenty of the influences are newer, too.
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In Este Haim’s full and rubbery basslines and in the widescreen shuffle of their beats, there’s more than a hint of Off The Wall-era Michael Jackson. “ The Wire” and “ Don’t Save Me” some of the oldies-radio glam-rock shuffle of T.
The one comparison that HAIM keep drawing is Fleetwood Mac, and that one makes sense there’s plenty of that band’s sweeping studio-rat elegance in what they do. But they also seem loose and unguarded and unforced in ways that would’ve made them look like complete aliens at, say, this year’s VMAs. And they are corporate-pop anointed ones their debut album is, after all, a major-label affair. In a less enlightened time, they’d be written off as corporate-pop anointed ones and dismissed accordingly. And their sound is lush and incandescent it sounds expensive. They absolutely leapfrogged the whole crusty-clubs circuit, and they’ll probably be playing near the top of festival bills by next summer. There’s nothing remotely indie rock about HAIM. It can be tough to describe the music on Days Are Gone because it doesn’t fit neatly into any pre-ordained template, and it doesn’t have much to do with any internet micro-trend that’s currently grubbing attention for itself. And it’s also there in they way all three sisters gracefully trade off lead-vocal duties, none of them hogging the frontman spotlight, and in the confidence it must take for all three to pull off totally convincing white-soul vocal showboating when the song calls for it. All those lessons don’t just manifest themselves in the obvious ways, in song-structure or guitar riffs, but in subtler, less showy ways as well: Quiet shades of backing-vocal interplay, perfectly-placed woodblock thunks, basslines so unshowy that you almost don’t notice how propulsive they are. On Days Are Gone, you can hear where the Gladwellian 10,000 hours that all three almost certainly put in pay off. Alana Haim, the youngest of the three sisters, was four when she started covering these ’70s classic-rock songs. The sisters’ first band was with their parents, and it was an all-covers thing with the hilarious name Rockinhaim. The Haim sisters did something similar with music, and they did it from a very early age.
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When you’re first learning how to write, teachers urge you to find sentences that you like and then to copy those sentences out longhand, so you get get a better idea of how they work, so you can start to internalize those mechanics. Their family must be over the moon.Īnd honestly, those parents get some of the credit. I’ve never met the sisters in HAIM, and I’m proud of them. They seem to have their sound totally figured out, and even the most forgettable songs have so many tiny swirling hooks that it takes weeks of listening to sniff them all out. There’s not one underwhelming song on the whole thing, and the level of shimmering craft is through the roof.
Now, with their first album, they’ve made an LP of assured and fizzy pop music, one that sounds utterly of-the-moment without conforming to a single recent trend. If you watch them onstage, the three sisters, all in their early-to-mid-20s, seem self-possessed and present in ways that much more seasoned bands are still trying to figure out - and they all seem to genuinely like each other, which is an accomplishment in itself. I practically explode with pride every time I hear my daughter atonally howl along to the Annie soundtrack, so it’s tough to conceive of what the parents of the Haim sisters must be going through.
I am absolutely outing myself as a lame sentimental dad here, but I can’t think about HAIM, the young and ridiculously talented band of California sisters, without imagining how proud their parents must be.