Despite a reputation for enforced authenticity and purity, country music has always offered fertile ground for reinvention and reinterpretation. Outside Music Row in Nashville, artists can tweak, manipulate, and toy with old formulas. You can almost set a clock to it. Every decade or so, new ways of thinking provide fresh twists on the genre while still showing respect the classics.
Such is the work of Dividers.
Based in Los Angeles, this inventive duo creates a trippy brand of country that openly embraces psych, folk, and drone elements. On their new album, entitled Crime of Passion, swampy washes of sound mask the group’s refined musicianship. Released on Primordial Void, this eight-song project features elements of War on Drugs, My Morning Jacket, The Grateful Dead, and Tame Impala.
Imagine Laurel Canyon, Bakersfield, and Athens joining forces for 45 minutes of sludgy pop music. Samuel Miller and Lawrence Moody invert the sonic landscapes of their respective influences with a captivating attention to detail. The guys render tight arrangements with precise sloppiness and then drench everything in walls of distortion and thick feedback.
The guitars warble with surf-ish glee.
I like the heavy panning effects running throughout the album, especially the spaced-out ambiance they evoke. While the production aesthetic overflows with echo, reverb, tremolo, and delay, big hooks and catchy turns lie under those muddy layers. Moreover, the entire effect reminds me of low-budget science fiction, horror flicks, and spaghetti westerns.
“Spun Out” has luxurious squalls of shoegaze guitar that slide into a pristine example of languid ‘70s country rock. On “The Path,” Byrds-inflected alt-country gets reinvented as jangly power-pop with raucous barroom energy. “Wichita Reflection” serves as the album’s most direct homage to The Grateful Dead, as the intro covers material from Robert Hunter and Bob Weir. The shuffling tune the gently rambles for nearly four minutes before pitch-bending into navel-gazing drone for two more minutes.
Crime of Passion is a succulent gumbo packed with fantastic flavors and tantalizing textures. Dividers has re-imagined mournful bar tunes as psychedelic jam sessions without the copious noodling. As a result, you find yourself snapping your fingers and tapping your toes to slowed-down country songs that have morphed into jammy dirges.