Quivers - Golden Doubt LP Blue Vinyl
Blue vinyl LP.
“Australia's Quivers craft bright, jangly pop that draws influence from bands from their own backyard... and calls to mind bands from the '80s, like early-R.E.M., or ... the warm, crisp guitar sound of The La's” - KEXP
Melbourne-via-Tasmanian four-piece Quivers first released their 2018 debut We’ll Go Riding on the Hearses as hand-made cassettes. The album dealt with singer Sam Nicholson’s loss of his brother in a freediving accident, and “trying to not think about that, and often coming back to ghosts, benders, water, and pissing in the snow.” When demand for the album grew, it received a vinyl release and led Quivers to tour the US, film a KEXP session, and be selected by NPR Music for both the Austin 100 SXSW preview and as a ’Slingshot’ artist to watch. Their life-damaged but hopeful jangle pop has only sharpened since then, and while 2021 follow-up Golden Doubt conjures up REM or The Clean there is a lyrical directness that sets this record apart as always its own.
Quivers need to get words on the page and sounds out to keep moving on. Both Sam and Holly have lost brothers, and so Golden Doubt is also about how we use music to process things together rather than just carry them alone.. The cancellation of a 21-date US tour they had slated for 2020 has left them undeterred; Quivers plans to continue being a band and get back out into the world as soon as it’s possible.
Quivers stretched out in making Golden Doubt once they nailed foundational band recordings, adding walls of violins (“Hold You Back”), a nine-person choir to “Chinese Medicine”, and a broken Farfisa organ anywhere it would fit. On the striking “Nostalgia Will Kill You,” Michael Panton's guitar channels Santo & Johnny; with a fresh take on 50s group vocals, Sam, Bella, and Holly sing in wrenching stop-and-starts, “you can’t go back everywhere you want to go / nostalgia will kill you.”
For Quivers, having their favorite records in mind is a motivating force. Chasing the heights of bittersweet earworms suits them on glistening guitar pop like “When It Breaks” and the slower 1990s’ guitar glow of “Videostores.” Between albums they covered R.E.M.’s Out of Time in full for Turntable Kitchen’s vinyl series, which reminded them: “You can’t forget guitars. Two guitars, a bass, drums and whatever voices are about will always be a good sound to get tangled up in.”
Of the title, Sam says: “Golden, because musically we daydream with the guitars of Teenage Fanclub and The Cure, the singing of The Roches’ sisters, the basslines of Another Sunny Day, and the drums of Lower Dens or Car Seat Headrest. Golden Doubt, because hitting your thirties after losing people knocks you off balance for a while, but no longer caring what the world thinks is always a breakthrough feeling.” Quivers may have created the antidote to existential dread by embedding it in songs that feel so present and alive, we might not find firm ground, but there’s bliss in swinging from hook to hook as they sing “we stayed out ‘til there was glitter in our lungs.” Sooner or later you wake up and the doubt has long gone.