The ever delightful The Electorate return with another tasty single ‘The Great Divide’ off their forthcoming album ‘By Design’. And this time it is a personal look at emotional pain, rather than the political.
The pace is reflective with crystalline guitars that jangle with a clarity while the vocals are to the fore with ethereal harmonies. The track ebbs and flows but sparkles through every note, drenched in a certain satisfying melancholia with an antipodean flavour in the delivery and enunciation. As usual, The Electorate produce something that is majestic and anthemic. The chorus at the end is stirring and emotional before laying you gently down to rest.
According to the band:
Lyrically, ‘The Great Divide’ is part confession and part map making. What happens when you stop being honest with yourself, and the people around you, and how do you find your way back from that.
The lyrics are raw and visceral:
We were lovers
We were mates
Dancing on tectonic plates
When they shifted and we fell
Straight past hell into
The great divide
between what I feel inside
and what I’ll say when you ask if I’m ok
Towards the end, with a nod to The Go-Betweens, there is a hint of resolution – I am going to bridge the great divide.
Marvellous stuff as always.
Produced by the band with the legendary Wayne Connolly and out through the magnificent Love As Fiction Records, this is another brick in the wall of what is promising to be a stunning album from this magnificent trio.
Of course The Electorate were almost single handedly responsible for the development of my theory of the Marrickville Sound – experienced musicians with an impeccable history forming to produce some the best indie music around. As the band says:
We started off life as the Templebears, split up, joined Big Heavy Stuff, The Apartments, Atticus, & others, before picking up, some 20 years later.
The Electorate is Nick Kennedy, Eliot Fish & Josh Morris. Creativity has no use-by date.
