By Jay Mukherjee
Melbourne, Australia's Quivers, the band behind my favorite album of 2021 (Golden Doubt), are back with a brand new (and much anticipated by me!) record. With Oyster Cuts, the band finds itself on venerable North Carolina label Merge Records, one of my favorite labels (Warning "Old Man Alert": back in my pre-internet days, we had to buy albums solely based on nothing but the record label a band was on; the person who produced their album; and/or how cool the album cover was! So record labels were important! Okay, old man rant over!)
If you are not familiar with Quivers, their boy/girl interplay indie pop is reminiscent of that of known favorites like The Go-Betweens, The Apartments, and lesser known bands like Dick Diver and the now-defunct The Goon Sax. The common historical through-line for all these bands are, of course, Fleetwood Mac, hints of which you can also hear here if you listen closely. Essentially, Quivers are a band that successfully bridges various eras and styles without sounding derivative.
Album opener "Never Be Lonely" and "More Lost" remind me of another Merge Records band (and favorite of mine), Sweden's Shout Out Louds. Listening to these two songs, it makes sense why this label decided to sign Quivers. "Apparition", with its upbeat rock sound, stands apart from the rest of the album. This song could easily appear on any of Robert Forster's albums (well, maybe not the last one; it was too sad for this sound!). Singer Sam Nicholson shows a sneaky sense of humor by singing "Oh my god, oh my god, everybody's got, everybody's got a reason/They're always leaving, do you turn into an apparition/Do you turn into an apparition/Do you turn into an apparition without the smoke?"
"Grief Has Feathers" is a lovely sophisti-pop, Prefab Sprout-y song which could fit next to any song on Badly Drawn Boy's About a Boy soundtrack. Sam sings melancholically, "Grief has feathers/It must be a bird/And it will move away or so I heard/To somewhere warmer for most of the year." This hits you between the ribs. "Screensaver" mixes The Ocean Blue and Snow Patrol guitar riffs to whistfully exclaim, "I'll be yours, I'll be yours/I'll be your screensaver", while "If Only" sounds like a long lost Jenny Lewis/Rilo Kiley song. You can definately hear the Lucinda Williams influence on this one, whose song "I Wanted to See you So Bad" they have covered brilliantly in concert to an appreciative crowd.
My two favorite songs on Oyster Cuts are the soaring "Pink Smoke" and the title track. The former builds and builds like "Gutters of Love", my favorite track from their last album, then ends with the soaring chorus of "I hope, I hope whenever get lost in the pink, pink smoke/We'll go driving round and round/We'll go driving round and round." The title track is a deeply emotional and beautiful song. Bella Quinlan sings, "Just when I was giving up on love giving up on love/I had a strange suspicion: I might have dreamt you up." Many of us have been there.
The qualities of Oyster Cuts are ones that link up nicely with many of the bands who clearly inspired Quivers, and those are bands which all of us here at this site love. Quivers are really doing this exactly right, and Oyster Cuts is a great album, and clearly one of the best of 2024. Given how strong this first half of the year has been for new music, that is a rave from me.
Oyster Cuts by Quivers is out today via Merge Records.
[Photo: Rick Clifford]