Something slightly ragged and wonderfully real about ‘It’s The Sky,’ the opening track of Diver Through’s latest EP, I Want to be Disrupted. And I mean that in the best way: ragged rather than overpolished; real as in authentic, honest, perhaps slightly old-school…music made for all the right reasons, music made in the moment.
Woven from a sound found where the rawness of a roots sound is energised by more rock-and-roll urges, this is exactly what people mean when they say roots-rock, I guess. Tribal beats skitter and scatter, guitars growl and glower, basslines throb menacingly as the vocals are washed upward toward sonic crescendos, then float back down to earth.
And earth is a pertinent word for a song about the sky’s increasing instability in the face of a changing climate, although it might be just as much a metaphor for the contradictory nature of the human condition as it is for actual environmental shifts.
As an advertisement for the EP as a whole, ‘It’s the Sky’ more than earns its keep; as a single in its own right, it certainly stands on its own two feet. But for me, it is that resilience in the face of the encroachment of AI artifice, of digital dabbling; it is a celebration of making music that is about substance rather than style, that doesn’t heed fad or fashion, which makes you think that if you saw the band play this live, it would sound the same; that makes me think that bands such as Diver Through are an important part of both the fight back and the step forward.
