Watching Haim‘s Glastonbury performance back from this summer is a fairly disorienting experience.
Here are the three sisters dressed in not very much – mini dresses, hot pants, leather biker’s jerkins – all cussing like bin men on a hot day, the vaguely boho whiff of their LA upbringing dispensed with for attitude, screeching guitars and the strutting dynamics of a real rock n’ roll show.
Why so confusing then? Well, it’s because the three women on the Pyramid Stage – who frankly make out like they’re having the time of their lives, squawking like Pat Benatar, Suzi Q or any other female of the last 40 years with dirt under their nail polish – don’t appear to be the same trio that made ‘Days Are Gone‘, that’s why.
Their story as siblings who escape the Glee Club and go on to cross airbrushed Laurel Canyon hippiness with late twentieth century R&B equally seems to ring slightly too good to be true, but having caught the ear of Julian Casablancas, the Haim collectives’ gong as the Sound of 2013 has guaranteed them plenty of airtime. Cue our confusion.
This is because ‘Days Are Gone’ has lots to admire, but not much of it in a trashing hotel rooms and vomiting in your roadies’ knapsack kind of way. There are flashes of that combustible, angrier live streak, particularly on the more tribal overtones of ‘Let Me Go‘; Danielle, Este and Alana‘s poly-harmonics and the squawking of bluesier guitars all coming close to unleashing the beast. This proves to be a finger-in-the-air exception however, the grind playing second fiddle to a smarter, pop rule.
Comparisons have often been made to the girls’ obsession with the song and the dynamic of Fleetwood Mac – an approach to the process which easily forgets that the latter leaned on a blizzard of inter personal subterfuge and cocaine for inspiration. No-one’s suggesting that this has played any part in the process, but by the time that same stimulant had grown up into the Eighties, it was helping to make the kind of music that sounded like a Californian night, the glossy neon shadows of ‘Don’t Save Me‘ and ‘If I Could Change Your Mind‘ every bit here as gorgeously disposable.
If the latter is the trio being as unashamedly direct as possible, opener ‘Falling‘ repeats the dose but wraps one of those laconic, Clapton-lite guitar riffs around the ‘just wanna have fun’ vibe, guilty pleasures for those who lack the time for remorse.
At its most outlandish, ‘My Song 5‘ recasts the whole damn thing under the yoke of New Jack Swing with a major riff complex; in this incarnation the whole Haim vibe seems to come most alive, the fault line between the rock chick and sassy metropolitan personalities unquestionably at its widest.
You’re left wondering who you saw at Glastonbury, where the real instincts of the sisters lie. For now though, that doesn’t matter; ‘Days Are Gone’ is the work of ideas bouncing off each other at a thousand miles an hour, and putting boxes around them would be almost cruel.
Only a fool would put something along the lines of them doing it for themselves here, but a fool I am, and they are.
