7"
Efficient Space return to the fertile ground of their Ghost Riders compilation with a closer look at the work of Dennis Harte, an early 70s pre-teen prodigy with a penchant for the kind of spirited garage-soul-pop that's also retrospectively made superstars of Donnie and Joe Emerson. If you own that parent compilation, you'll likely know the title track as one of its stand-out moments, a blue-eyed rumination on young love and yearning that seems too perfect to have ever been lost. It's once again the stand-out amongst the four songs on this new 7", though only tells part of the story. Harte, like Donnie and Joe, recorded other music with his brothers, all of which was released under a series of names for label impresario Carl Edelson's purpose-built Roundtable Records - thus, we get here a track each from Harte Attack and Pure Madness, and a second from Harte by himself. Taken together they present an overview of exercises in the pop music of the time, varying degrees of soul/blues/garage/psych rock that sound both classic and naive. If on first listen they seem generic and the lyrical content extremely, shall we say, innocent, then that's probably the point. These were, after all, just children taking a shot at their dreams (or perhaps just the dreams of their label owner) and missing them only by a whisker. Well, that's life, a few near-hits, a lot of misses. But what price the chance to dream? And that's exactly what these songs sound like, now as then.
