A rowdy newcomer to the scene wins the right to stick around
by Leslie Wylie
When Dixie Dirt showed up with Divorce to play a show at the Longbranch in early October, it was like the prom queen showing up for a high school dance with a freshman. Aside from a house party, Divorce had never played a show out before, much less to a bar packed full of discerning hipsters who'd paid $5 to slobber over the main act, not some unknown opening band.
But it only took vocalist Maggie Brannon a few screams to convince the crowd that Divorce was no second-string mercy date, and there sure as hell wouldn't be any slow dances. The set was more like a punk-rock Baptist sermon, with Brannon preaching confrontational poetry at the helm over discordant guitars, hyper-aggressive drums and cranked-up amplifiers.
The visceral debut was successful and a considerable buzz subsequently spread about the band, mostly via word-of-mouth, leading to a string of well-received shows around town. Just over three months later, it's hard to imagine that before Divorce, Brannon's musical background was limited to a few attempts to start chick bands, which were unfailing aborted after the first night's practice.
"I scream a lot," the Powell native says in a subdued voice that belies her on-stage histrionics. "I never feel like I'm loud enough, and so I just keep getting louder. And I think all my life I've tried to avoid the Southern accent, like I've really tried to suppress it, but when I sing it just makes it a lot easier to have an accent."
Brannon first collaborated with guitarist George Miller and bassist Mitchel W.K.—the two of whom had been playing together on and off in projects for around eight years—in February 2002 after they asked her to lay some vocals down over a song they were working on. Nothing serious came of it until drummer T Bone Jackson signed on during the summer of 2003, and something at the crux of the four musicians' different approaches began to make sense.
"When the drums and the bass lock up, there's a lot of almost real natural disco-techno heavy backbeats," W.K. explains, "and then the guitar is real atmospheric wandering over it, a lot of soundscaping.
"I kind of describe Maggie in terms of The Jesus Lizard as far embracing a kind of odd, mysterious Southern-ness. I don't know, in each song her voice takes on this identity of a figure in a really bizarre situation or kind of a landscape, using just really decorative words," he says.
Also in the tradition of The Jesus Lizard, the '90s-era noise rock band the band cites as a major influence, Divorce is loud. So loud that it got shut down one night by the police while playing a show at Cup-A-Joe's in The Old City after an area resident filed a noise complaint—a punk-rock rite of passage if there ever was one. However, Divorce interpreted the pseudo-debacle into somewhat more self-depreciating terms.
"It actually worked out really nicely," says Jackson. "We were pretty much done anyway, so it was cool. It kind of inspired a little anger in people that were wanting to see more, made them think we had something more to give, and really we were done."
"While we were playing I kept looking outside the window and there were all these people standing outside like they were trying to get into it or something, but really they just wanted us to be quiet," adds Miller.
Aside from that story, Divorce admits that it's still too young to have much hot air to blow—no CDs to plug, no tour anecdotes, no sordid trials and tribulations worth mentioning. In fact, the band only half-jokingly suggested using its story space as a shout-out list to the people, bands and venues that have backed its progress so vehemently over the past few months: Dixie Dirt ("They've been so supportive of us,"); The Cuts ("We owe it all to them,"); The Pilot Light ("Can we talk about how cool The Pilot Light is?").
"Really, I think it's appropriate because in the grand scheme of things, compared to most bands in this town, we don't have a whole shitload of things to talk about. There's so much we still haven't done," Jackson says. "We're just all really happy with the way things are going."
January 8, 2004 * Vol. 14, No. 2
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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