Harvey McLaughlin

Featured on Peña, Harvey's newest release

From the unhinged mind of singer/songwriter Harvey McLaughlin comes ‘Rascality’ - twelve tracks of throwback rock and roll that’s reminiscent of the great piano rock albums by artists such as Warren Zevon, Tom Waits and Randy Newman with it’s own brand of cheekiness and an updated sensibility. On the heels of 2018's full length ‘Tabloid News’ and the 2019 EP ‘Automaton’, ‘Rascality' features McLaughlin's weird and wild brand of storytelling - reveling in subjects ranging from Chinese restaurants to carnival excursions to the red pyramids of Mars and everything between.
 

What you now hold in your damp hands is the follow up, a hazardous cocktail of pre-war R&B and proto-rock’n’roll entitled ‘Rascality’. Over the course of 12 songs McLaughlin spins a tense series of yarns designed to romance and hypnotize your aural openings with tales to beckon you into his orbit of mad comic imagery.
 

 This room has ghosts.

Ghosts that scream and wail in the oblivion as if they were shooting dice and drinking in an all night lounge. Ghosts that speak in tongues. Ghosts that dress from some other world, some other time in the past - I’m talking corsets and JNCO jeans.

I can hear them on this record (at least I think I can).

It wasn’t the intention to disturb these spirits; I didn’t even bring a ouija board to the sessions. But when they heard what we were doing, they made their presence known and demanded to be involved. It was not an easy process, as collaboration with the after world is arduous and intense. Have you ever tried harmonizing with a spectre?? There’s nothing like a poltergeist banging on your piano top for not staying on tempo.

We did these recordings analog style on a temperamental reel-to-reel, deep in the belly of a vault-like basement on October 21st 2018. We recorded way more than intended and most of it got cut. What you’re hearing here is a snapshot of what was floating around us at the time and I’m very proud to capture the mood, in all its ghostly glory.

Thanks to all y’all that made this real - living, dead and undead.

Harvey McLaughlin might just be the most elderly thirty-year old you’ll ever be lucky enough to meet. Hailing from San Antonio’s hard-scrabble deep southwestern quarter, the son of a seamstress and an auto mechanic, McLaughlin has spent about half of his life learning the ropes in a number of local bands; the eponymous Lord Harvey - a trio that might be compared to The Squeeze getting tangled up with Spacemen Three, The Sandworms - an incredibly loud gothic surf band, The Hares - a rootsed-up septet who shared the inspirations and captured the fire of The Blasters debut album and took it up a notch, and, the list goes on. For anyone who’s watched this progression take place, one listen to his new album ‘Tabloid News’ will show that this wasn’t squandered effort but a necessary part of the journey as it is all folded into a disciplined package.

‘Tabloid News’ is loosely conceptual, drawing on Harvey’s fixation and preoccupation with urban legends, science fiction and pseudo-science. But, rather than just throwing out a laundry list of uninspired phenomena name-checking he manages to create developed characterization and perspective inside the boundaries of two to four minute songs, no small feat.