Quick Review: Divorce

Wow, this was an unexpected blast! When I listened to Divorce before I thought they were quite nice. Their live performance at West Germany yesterday however kind of blew me away.

Unfortunately we arrived relatively late and missed Schwund, the first band that played instead of the earlier announced Ex-Best-Friends, completely. 

Divorce were already on stage and started to play, so we made our way closer to have a look. I was instantly convinced that this was going to be great. The sound was really good and they sounded somehow different to what I expected. When I first listened to some of their songs, I thought of other no-wave noise rock bands like Aids Wolf or Arab on Radar and I guess they get often compared to bands like that. But Divorce sounded less edgy and hectic and way more heavy live, which I really liked and which made them somewhat special. They had a very thick and upfront sound and their singer changed from fierce shrieking to more spoken word passages. I was totally amazed by their guitarist, she sort of carried the whole thing musically by playing heavy but at the same time very rhythmical and melodic guitar lines. Add a mean and distorted fuzzy bass and driving straight drums to the mix and you sort of get the idea. They did not just create a wall of noise but managed to always keep interesting structures and rhythms in their songs. Everything sounded perfectly together and they just played a very coherent and consistent set of amazing in-your-face noise rock that left me happy and glad to have made it to the show after all.

I seriously hope this wasn't my last Divorce.

By the way, you can stream and buy their entire debut full-length record on their bandcamp page, give it a listen!