Friends have to keep up. Distance, interstates, static on the other end of line and familiar faces fading. The static becomes the voice you knew. Distance bogs the memories down. A chasm is created. So my friend, Nathan, lodged on one part of the east coast, and I, perched on another, tried to fill this hole. A name was found and concepts were forged. Nathan played the music and I pushed out the words. This Continental Divide worked for a while. But people grow in different directions, trees arched in different angles. Nathan kept with the music and began to discover his own words, I shifted my focus to finish university. A first and final show was played to a small circle of friends in a backyard the last night of 2004. Covered in the crackle and dance of a firepit, we clumsily plowed through a medley of spontaneously written pop and pseudo-gospel collages and proceeded to file this memory and phase of our lives away to face future distances.
Nathan continued to work on his music and started to find even more words. Making his sweltering garage a studio of sorts (replete with ancient pianos, basic recording equipment, his mother's watercolors taped to the walls, and plenty of insects), he began to hone his songs into something with more focus than our first live foray. They warbled with a Rhodes piano and resonated with the glare of dusty cymbals. The direction the instruments took fell in line to Nathan's unassuming voice. It was much different than it is now. More unassuming, timid, but the timbre, its essence for lack of better words, has remained. He carved out a whole release in this manner. Hand-made in his back porch (with the help of his brother) and distributed at shows, he found a new cast of friends to help him fulfill the vision it contained. The shows played for this release and the times that ensued were stored away in memories for future distances this group of friends would face.
All the while, Nathan continued to send me songs. I continued to send him my thoughts and concepts. We attempted to brave the chasm between us. It was at this point that he began his collegiate career. His focus began to shift but he still clung to his music. In the year and half that followed, he managed to fill the remaining space in his head (the space not filled with literary analysis and linguistics) with the seeds for new ideas and new structures. He brought them back to the garage that he had left for dorm rooms and began work on the EP called Golden Throats. I would come back to my house to read email inbox filled with demos, lyrics from this or that song, parts that hadn't been finished but needed to be shared. I was able to watch them evolve and provided what I could to aid in his
Like the relationship I share with its creator, Continental Divide's music is chasms. Singing and echoing through and across the distance between quick turns of phrase and densely laid guitars and synthesizers, Nathan weaves into Golden Throats stories familiar with emotion and distant with metaphor and allusion. Four Scenes opens the EP with Pemberton's vocals echoing easily against a simple guitar melody that builds to include crashing drums and running glockenspiels. The ease of the vocal delivery carries throughout each song, but that ease is not for lack of effort or concern in Pemberton's voice. Indeed, admitting one's parents are shadows and pining to be forgotten are not conclusions easily gathered, but Continental Divide is content with allowing the implicit emotion of their lyrics to be filled by the force of crashing guitars and airy keyboards. The title track Golden Throat delivers on the promise of its surrounding numbers by employing the single-voice-single-instrument-building-to-the-brink-of-disarray structure used throughout the EP. Pemberton’s reverb-laden vocals keep the song from becoming too danceable or recognizably poppy as they fade in and out. The phrases seem to echo through a dense cloud of instruments building and collapsing onto and into one another, suspended like memories just beyond the brink of recognition. The desire for recognition surfaces again and again in the both lyrics and musicality in these songs as Pemberton yelps and groans and sings across the void of memory and emotion and loss and relationships. Continental Divide's music is chasms, but they are chasms filled to the brink.
--Bradley Speaks
www.myspace.com/continentaldivide
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