The music industry is just as much of an illusion as the global financial system. Get enough people to believe in it, and it works. Make enough people reject it, and it falls apart. How else would you explain the rise of punk and alternative music out of the modest confines of basement clubs that could only host a dozen people at a time?
It’s all far-fetched, ridiculous and unconvincing until someone dreams it up and coughs it down on a canvas or tape. The New York art scenes keep creating itself. That includes rock music. And the people making it have no reason to want to resemble anyone else, or ask permission, hidden away behind mahogany desks. They just need a few people to love them truly.
St. Divine’s “you can’t go forward and you can’t go back” isn’t music made for people who can’t make a decision. These aren’t songs recorded or those who simply enjoy a good jingle dancing around their brain for a moment. Nah, this is a record made for folks looking for their own Ramones, New York Dolls, or Television.
It’s hard to fall in love with dull people, and impossible to develop a passion for an ordinary band. That’s precisely why the St. Divine quintet holds little back, disguises nothing and won’t bother cleaning up for when guests arrive.
The record opens with a cover of one of alternative music’s most important and bizarre groups. St. Divine delivers a version of “Some New Kind of Kick” by The Cramps. But instead of a psychobilly stomp, what you get are twin vocals blending together like chants in a ritualistic sex and murder ceremony.
The rest is just as entertaining, and the travel recommendation that NYC desperately needs at this point. “Swallow” is a kinked-up call-and-response love song that, one would imagine, even a band like The Kills, whose sound resembles this, would blink twice when asked to include on a record.
But St. Divine is fearless and, if anything, looking for a fight on a Saturday night. “DIY (Frankenstein)” is a hooky, minimalist track about stitching up a broken soul into a perfect love partner. “Mirror” is a hazy, psychedelic jam of the sort playing in your head when you’re unable to calculate a route to the club’s exit door. And the retro, garage stomp of “We Had Love” (originally by The Scientists)
helps us recall where this beautiful, evil music came from in the first place.
Still, there’s room for tenderness, too. St. Divine channels The Velvet Underground’s post-party downers on the gorgeous “Throwing Cards” and the sexy, creepy Lanegan/Campbell collabs for the dark folk number “Four Walls.”
Where does it all leave us? Reaching for a map and pen, hopefully. Great artists are managing to find themselves, working without a permit, and doing it in the middle of the night while the rest of the pension plans and winter tyres. But who else has even got a chance of saving the world?
