The Harvey Girls Saturday, Jan. 19

[January 16th, 2008]

[ECLECTRO-POP] When Hiram Lucke talks about his band, the Harvey Girls, he makes a clear distinction between the Internet and real life. “Now we’re a real band,” the slightly buzzed thirtysomething tells me from a squeaky Southwest Portland barstool. “We started as just a recording band, and we’ve moved in kinda small increments.” The biggest move came when Lucke and his wife, Melissa Rodenbeek, who both hold master’s degrees in literature, relocated to Portland from Lawrence, Kan., in 2006.

While some groups come to Portland to stake their claim in one of indie rock’s fastest-growing frontiers, the Harvey Girls—a band that infuses shoegaze and dark ’80s pop influences with more upbeat electronic experimentation—didn’t move here for music. Lucke lived in Portland more than a decade ago and remembered it fondly. And though he recalls Portland as being a bit funkier during his previous stay, he adds: “It’s still a lot cheaper than New York.”

If anything, the Girls’ modest success proves that geography has little to do with building a fan base in the internet age. He and Rodenbeek carved out a niche for the Harvey Girls via online music communities and blogs back in Lawrence. That Web-savvy landed the Girls an online distribution partnership with British blog Spoilt Victorian Child’s upstart SVC label, home of current Austin-based buzz-band Ringo Deathstarr, among others.

Despite 5,000 miles of separation between the Harvey Girls and their online home, Lucke says the relationship with SVC has been fruitful. Not only have the blog and label earned the Girls new listeners, but new projects, as well. “Every time an album would come out we’d all go, ‘Yay!’” he says. “And it’s still like that.”

Lucke took a special liking to the warm electro-pop beats of Sheffield, England’s, Feedle. Upon discovering that the admiration was mutual, the two groups embarked on a collaboration via email and file-sending website Sendspace. The result, a self-titled EP under the moniker Holland Buffalo, is an exercise in layering—exotic beats meet walls of fuzz and hushed vocals. It’s an amazingly cohesive, compelling release, especially considering that email has been the collaborators’ only form of communication. “We’ve never even talked on the phone,” Lucke says. “One of these days we’ll make some shows out of it.” Until then, the Harvey Girls remain Hiram Lucke’s only “real band.”