Being in a band gives you a platform most people don’t have, whether you’re playing to mass festival crowds or 30 people at a grassroots gig in the back room of an underground bar. And you could make a great argument that if, especially in the current age as the world seems to be going to hell in a hand bag/basket (delete as culturally applicable), you aren’t using such an opportunity to say something, then you are taking up too much space.
Look, I’m not saying that we can’t have love songs and silliness, music whose only purpose is to entertain or act as sonic escapism, but I am saying that maybe we can get back to that when we are not hanging over the precipice, when the dark clouds are no longer gathering on the horizon. Maybe, for the time being, we should use art to start dialogue, offer opinion, make statements, raise awareness…just like St. Divine does.
Being raw and riotous and rabble-rousing and rebellious is a worthy pursuit, but it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that…err…groove, and with ‘Midnight (to Track)’ they prove that you can entertain and inform, that we can try to change the world but have fun doing it too.
And fun it is. Of course, the band are found wielding their trademark proto-punk, low-slung, garage-rock, sleaze and scuzzy post-punkery, but this time things head in an almost Talking Heads direction, blending African mbira percussiveness and retro organ swells, moving across a soundscape of graceful lulls and heady crescendos, bass groove, and white-hot, fuzzed-out guitar lines. Swagger meets sophistication…of a sort!
‘Midnight to Track’ didn’t make the band’s recent debut album, The Devil You Know. Vinyl releases still come with the same age-old issues of space, but they’re still an important part of the conversation the band is having through these releases, so listen closely.
Smash the dancefloor tonight and smash the system in the morning… sounds like my sort of plan.
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