The Melbourne jangle-pop quartet hits all the right ‘80s pleasure points with an understated sense of humor and anthemic songcraft.
In an era when listeners can sample new music like sommeliers, slurping up tracks and spitting them out after three-second snap judgements, it makes evermore sense for a fledgling band to put their strongest song in the track-one/side-one lead-off position. And on their first proper stateside release, Melbourne quartet Quivers fully abide by that rule by opening Golden Doubt with “Gutters of Love,” an instant anthem that charts its journey from heartache to healing by gradually building from a solitary strummer to a skyscraping chorale. It’s the sound of bedsit 1980s college-rock thrust into the big-tent environs of 21st-century indie, like a Go-Betweens with Coachella-conquering ambitions or a Smiths with greater pub sing-along appeal. And it’s absolutely glorious.
Alas, “Gutters of Love” also sets a mighty high bar that the rest of Golden Doubt doesn’t attempt to clear again, as Quivers are largely content to cruise instead of soar. But even when the band is working within more modest proportions, they still exude a disarming charm. Quivers began as a therapeutic outlet for singer/guitarist Sam Nicholson, who spent much of 2018’s homespun debut, We’ll Go Riding on the Hearses, mourning his brother’s sudden death in a free-diving accident. After Nicholson and fellow guitarist Michael Panton relocated from their native Hobart to Melbourne, Quivers solidified into a four-piece with bassist Bella Quinlan and drummer Holly Thomas. While little has fundamentally changed about Nicholson’s songwriting since that first record, the addition of Quinlan and Thomas’ lustrous harmonies provides a welcome blast of sunshine to break up Nicholson’s rainy-day ruminations and point a brighter light on his understated sense of humor.
Golden Doubt abounds with the sort of effortlessly tuneful jangle-pop you’d expect from a band that released a full-album cover of R.E.M.’s Out of Time last year. They’re the kind of songs you swear you’ve heard before but can never quite place. On “You’re Not Always on My Mind,” you’ll hear traces of the Chills’ Kiwi-rock gallop, Echo and the Bunnymen’s psychedelicized guitar melodies, and the Cure’s mid-’80s shimmer. But the song is ultimately a showcase for Nicholson’s wry romanticism: When he sings “you’re not always on my mind,” he swiftly answers it with “just mostly all the time,” crystallizing the push-pull between outsized passion and self-preservation playing out across his lyric sheet.
While it hits all the right ‘80s-indie pleasure points, Golden Doubt is perpetually torn between reveling in bygone sounds and trying to outrun the specter of the past. Over a funereal drum beat, “Videostores” bids farewell to its titular subject alongside other outmoded phenomena like payphones and horse-drawn transportation. But the song isn’t so much looking back as trudging forward, as it reluctantly acknowledges the impracticality of clinging to days gone by, be it through obsolete technology or memories of extinguished flames. Another track puts a finer point on it: On the doo-wop-tinged “Nostalgia Will Kill You,” Quinlan and Thomas practically function as a Greek chorus cautioning Nicholson against his wistful tendencies: “You can’t go back! Everywhere you want to go!” But with the laid-back country rock of “Laughing Waters,” Nicholson works up the courage to carry on once and for all, as he declares, “I don’t wanna sing about death no more/We’ll go there one day and we’ve been there before,” en route to a sumptuous disco-stringed coda. For as much as it looks back musically, Golden Doubt is really an album to summon the better days that lie ahead.
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