ALBUM REVIEW: Divorce – ‘Drive To Goldenhammer’

It’s tough to understand your sense of place in the world. Your chosen career, your hometown, your unchosen career, your personal relationships: for each one that’s a thumbs-up, one will deem you lost. The grappling of identity and placement has loomed long over Ezra Furman-approved Divorce. The Nottingham band, after all, convened as result of “quarter life crisis”, sport a dressing-up box of alter ego looks for their live shows, and are at their most emphatically all-over-the-place on eccentric debut record Drive To Goldenhammer.

The fictional town of the name does grant it that feeling of intangible comfort—explored in spontaneous sonic shifts showing how reaching a desired destination is far from straight-forward. It all starts beautifully enough on the alt-country feeling of Antarctica, whose chorus groove picks up with a glorious overlapping backing vocal from bassist Tiger Cohen-Towell over Felix Mackenzie-Barrow’s persona that faces “a long drive” thinking about his love, huddling a new born baby and hearing a coo mooing, fitting the jug-band fiddles that paint the rural landscape. That style gets the doubling-down treatment on Old Broken String, a lulling porchside ditty that muses about growing older while nursing a beer on a rocking chair. Instead, All My Freaks’ breezy funky guitar chords sound like a barn dance serving piña coladas.

When Lord kicks in, the protagonist starts they’d “be damned if I don’t get home tonight”, where it’s playful dips into and out of lilting verses and loud-soft dynamics unravel that very confidence; Fever Pitch showcases crying in hotel rooms, and Jet Show sees a more deadbeat expression of “if I make it home on time”. Divorce’s characters are constantly going down this unfinished road, potentially drawing from the band’s own rise as artists in their own right. A disastrous gig in front of a room full of “reptiles” awaits the titular Karen before erupting into a fiery “requiem”, while All My Freaks takes the perspective of an up-and-comer awaiting their hubris.

Littered throughout are references to their journey being full of “rabbit holes” and “secret doors” matched by esoteric songwriting choices that delight when taking steps you never really expect. Fever Pitch’s chamber-pop hymns turn perverse with the singers talking about going and fucking themselves, before Adam Peter-Smith’s squeals channel Isaac Brock or Doug Martsch. Where Do You Go’s wonky-neo soul gets slinky, subdued, sexy and even threatening all at the same time. The album’s multi-suite centrepiece Pill starts ambient, introduces cinematic violins, and allows the full band to creep in slowly to describe the hallucinatory effect of love’s drug. All that before teasing a screamer of a crescendo, then pulling the rug with a soft memory recital from Cohen-Towell about someone bleeding on a bed’s top bunk, segueing dreamlike back to the song’s starting point.

It’s these musical hairpins that make Drive To Goldenhammer’s most memorable moments, especially amongst some of their more straight-forward indie-rockers. But through exploring a whole load of new lanes on this first full-length with conviction, humour, storytelling, singalong moments and musical freak-outs, Divorce seem perfectly at home with their sound, even despite the U-bends.

For fans of: Wednesday, Geese, Waxahatchee

‘Drive To Goldenhammer’ by Divorce is released on 7th March on Gravity Records / Capitol Records.

Words by Elliot Burr