AEM086 Loyal Divide

Loyal Divide is five guys who started play­ing music together in Colum­bus, Ohio around 2005 until the lure of bright(er) lights and a big(ger) city drew them to Chicago. It was a jour­ney not just of miles, but also of musi­cal mat­u­ra­tion. The ear­lier Loyal Divide received favor­able com­par­isons to Arcade Fire and Wolf Parade, com­par­isons most bands would be ecsta­tic about, but the band felt they were des­tined to make a dif­fer­ent style of music. The band pulls no punches in relat­ing their thoughts on their ear­li­est work, “For the first EP, we poured money  into record­ing time at a stu­dio with no real idea of what we were doing. We paid no heed to things like con­sis­tency and sequenc­ing, and the whole process was casual. That can work won­der­fully for some groups, but it didn’t for us. The music was ran­dom and deriv­a­tive as shit.” That’s an unusual level of hon­esty to hear from a band these days (doubt­less, they were their own fiercest crit­ics), but Loyal Divide is an unusual col­lec­tion of guys. In a day and age when most musi­cians jump from band to band, from side­pro­ject to side­pro­ject, look­ing for a win­ner and engag­ing in the sort of spec­u­la­tion you might expect to see from a Wall Street bro­ker, the five mem­bers of Loyal Divide remained true to their project. In the face of the pos­i­tive notices they received for their first EP, they reap­plied them­selves to find a sound that was more uniquely their own, in their words, “….we pur­chased some rudi­men­tary record­ing gear and started from scratch. The learn­ing process was long, and the out­put has been way too slow, but we’ve become more cere­bral and par­tic­u­lar about our music.” Now five years removed from their begin­nings in Colum­bus, Loyal Divide has estab­lished itself as a band to watch in its native Chicago and beyond, hav­ing carved out a unique blend of breathy shoegaze, Brian Eno intel­lec­tron­ica, and Kraftwerk’d beats. The results of their meta­mor­phoses pro­duced the well-received EP Labrador, which the band hopes to roll into a full-length album.

On the Labrador EP the lis­tener appre­ci­ates how far Loyal Divide have taken their songs from the indie rock gener­ica of Arcade Fire and Sub Pop flavors-of-the-month. A crunchy looped beat and cocked-pistol sam­ple sig­nals that we are out of the garage and very much “in da club” on the EP opener “Young Blades”. A bub­bling wave of synth, a siren blast, and tribal rhythms com­bine into a DJ Shadow-esque mélange. The vocals don’t come into full focus until a minute and a half into the four minute song– only then do you real­ize there is a band behind this wall of atmos­pheric trip-hoptronica, not a DJ. And when the vocals do come, they are soft, mantric, repet­i­tive, almost sound­ing like sam­ples them­selves, coaxed out of the peaks and val­leys of the ambi­ent sound­scape instead of being laid over the top like movie cred­its. Adam John­son and Christo­pher Sadek share the vocal duties; the pair’s strat­egy is to use vocals to cre­ate atmos­phere and ambi­ence woven directly into the fab­ric of the song. There are no Amer­i­can Idol moments here, no Broad­way turns, no grand­stand­ing, noth­ing that will dis­tract the lis­tener from the puls­ing musi­cal ges­tures of the under­ly­ing themes. That doesn’t mean the vocals are strictly wall­flow­ers though– in fact, the deci­sive motif on the song “Vision Vision” (named #1 song of 2009 by Radio One Chicago, by the way) is an earth­shat­ter­ing howl. It cuts you to the quick, a sort of Trent Reznor “I want to fuck you like an ani­mal” ban­shee scream that, for all its fear­some­ness, kind of makes you want to get out on the dance­floor and shake your damn boo-tay.

For their A-side, Loyal Divide is shar­ing with the Ampeater Review read­ers a sin­gle off their upcom­ing album. The track is called “DDF” and shows how deftly the group has melded their “rock bandy” roots with a more con­tem­po­rary club­tron­ica sound. Bassist Sid­dharth Chit­ta­jallu and drum­mer Andrew McCarthy lay down a creep­ing, crawl­ing rhythm over which floats the sig­na­ture motif of the tracks, what sounds like a sam­ple of clas­si­cal Hin­dus­tani verse run through heavy effects, plus a tremolo. The tremolo trans­forms the sam­ple into a puls­ing, hyp­notic wash of sound while the rhythm sec­tion con­tin­ues to grind away at the lis­tener. This motif alter­nates with for­bid­ding, Depeche-moody vocal stan­zas, trad­ing back and forth. And as the song begins to work its way into the inte­rior recesses of your body and mind, a more dis­tinctly Ori­en­tal sam­ple fades in like an advanc­ing bank of thick fog, swal­low­ing the lis­tener whole. For the B-side the Ampeater Review is for­tu­nate to get a hold of a pre­vi­ously unre­leased mix, a remix of Loyal Divide’s pop­u­lar “Vision Vision.” All the old ele­ments are in place: the slap bass, dreamy “land­ing UFO” whir, the hyp­notic beats, but a few sub­tle effects have been added to fore­ground the fear­some ban­shee howl all the more. The disco-vampire screech is kicked up a notch, enter­ing a “breakdown”-mode for a fiery final salute in the last minute of the song.

With a suc­cess­ful EP, a sharp video of their hit sin­gle “Vision Vision” (shot by BBGun Film) and some good touring/festival expe­ri­ence (the band’s high­light of SXSW: “We ran­domly saw GZA on an out­door stage play­ing shit from Liq­uid Swords.  So cool.”), Loyal Divide looks poised to make an impact with their as-yet-untitled full-length album set for release some­time in May. The band shared some early insight on the release with the Ampeater Review: “It’s basi­cally an expan­sion of the Labrador EP with 8 or pos­si­bly 9 new songs.  The new songs sound like NIN on a shoe­string bud­get minus the goth poetry, but a bit looser.” For all you fans of goth poetry out there, don’t be con­cerned because there are plenty of dark rites to feast on in the grind­ing rhythms, synth ambiance, and sub­bac­ultcha club aes­thetic. It’s best to leave the indus­trial haikus to Mr. Reznor, the quasi-reliqious anthems to Arcade Fire, the bed­room indie to Wolf Parade, and let Loyal Divide just be their glo­ri­ous selves. It’s worked damn fine so far.

Mike Gutier­rez

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