Thurs Dec 18, Graceland, 8 pm, $7 (all ages).
In Manic Pop Thrill, her 1993 collection of essays on Britain's early "alternative music" industry, author Rachel Felder discusses "grebo" bands--grebo being the term journalists had given to a vitality encompassing youthful angst without grunge's heavy somberness. The Jam and the Clash influenced grebo bands Mega City Four, Senseless Things, Pop Will Eat Itself, and the Wonder Stuff, whose songs bristled with the crackling energy of teenage rebellion. "Grebo is about a 15-year-old kid feeling trapped," says Felder, "yet who wants to bolt out and explore life instead of ending it. If Nirvana is an angry kid pounding a punching bag, Mega City Four is a revved-up kid dancing in front of his bathroom mirror, dreaming of how his life could be better and free."
A similar unchecked vivacity defines the songs on the Divorce's There Will Be Blood Tonight. Released last year on Fugitive Recordings, the Seattle band's debut sounds like a powder keg of frustrated desires and wishes felt by an outsider looking in. Singer and guitarist Shane Berry spits out lacerating lyrics like, "I tried so hard/to get every single word out/that my tongue carved little scars/in the roof of my mouth" ("Catch You Disappointed"), or "We'll be calling a roll call/for people weak in the knees/and then we'll call them all liars/because we do as we damn well please" ("Knife and Kids") while he and his bandmates--bass player Jimmy Curran and drummer Kyle Risan--articulate fits of envy-driven disgust and a spirit that won't go down easy. Here, boredom fuels certain bombast, the kind that reminds the listener what a blast it was to be young and smarter than everyone else.
When I express my love of "Knife and Kids," new guitarist Garrett Lunceford explains that the writing process found the song to be completely transformed from how Berry originally thought it should be. The singer agrees: "And then Kyle made it something that was absolutely nothing like Garrett was looking for when I asked for his input..." he says, before Lunceford finishes the thought with, "but it sounded really cool... we were looking for a straightforward, '90s guitar-rock sound and it ended up coming out more complicated, and the verses were never straightforward-rock-sounding in the first place." Adds Berry, "Still, driving guitars are the first thing you hear in the song. A lot of the songs on the album are guitar-rock songs, but the [new] stuff we're playing now is much broader in terms of ideas." "It's kind of like the progression from [Radiohead's] Pablo Honey to The Bends," says Lunceford, "only on an entirely less important scale."
Now with every member having lived through adolescence, the Divorce suffer the pains caused by a different sense of frustration: Seattle's fickle live-music fans. Every bit as talented as some of the more acclaimed bands who came out of the gates in the winning position, the Divorce and their peers the Lashes, Visqueen, and Alien Crime Syndicate have stalled just short of the prize. But that doesn't mean the newly expanded band has to stay there--in fact, the quickly approaching new year looks to be full of opportunity for all four of those determined journeyman outfits. (Not only did an AWOL Courtney Love, who only just missed the Divorce's recent set at the Derby in Los Feliz, express her interest in the band, but some labels have expressed theirs as well.) "It has been kind of frustrating because we were starting to look forward to what signing to Fugitive would lead to," says Berry. "At times it's kind of nice being in that middle ground where we're building our own thing and not trying to ride the coattails of those other bands."
Ensuring things stay fresh and unfaded, the addition of Lunceford, as well as a more prominent keyboard presence, has punched up the pop sound embedded in the Divorce's volatile rock sensibilities. And given the diversity of each member's personal influences (which they are loath to give up in the presence of a tape recorder, aside from Risan, who readily offers Van Halen), it's unlikely their songs will settle down to predictable cliché anytime soon. "Since we're still in that middle level of popularity," says Lunceford noting that their second album will be the first one many future fans will hear, "we can bounce new ideas off our audience because it's growing along with us."
