It’s a sort of impressionistic landscape with shades of the Beatles, the Kinks and even Wilco, lots of moments of exuberance, and bright scream-your-heart-out instants like in the two first tracks ‘Candy’ and ‘Friends’ and several other songs.
The Irish Pat Dam Smyth recorded his album in Belfast with a host of local musicians and producers, and if many of the songs let a large place to a bouncing piano, it is balanced by percussion, soaring guitars, and even strings and horns.
What Smyth accomplished with ‘U’ at minute 1:40, when the gorgeous vocal harmonies are fading and then wake up with too many heart-warming voices carried by strings than you can bear, is what probably make this album so personal and universal at the same time.
‘Riches to Rags’ has some ‘I Am the Walrus’ and psychedelic Beatlemania going on in the beginning, but the song has more surprises than you would expect, and breathes like a bipolar animal.
There is more drama with the titled song ‘The great Divide’, a sort of piano-cabaret-like drunken waltz, bringing a concoction of irony and theatrical mise-en-scène of triumphant horns and sad piano notes, escalating into some end-of-the-world-declarations: ‘That’s why I’m going away from you’.
There is also a lot of that irony and humor with ‘St Ides Of March’, a jolting piano song breaking the tempo several times, successively restarting like a circus fanfare, dying in a lullaby before resurrecting again, like a ‘Smile’ on Brian Wilson’s face.
New heights of despair are reached with ‘The Dark Knight of the Soul’, which has to be a wink to the Sparklehorse’s album, especially since Pat Dam Smyth sings ‘Shine a little light on me/ because I’m close to the edge’.
If some songs start like quiet piano ballads, you are never very far from sudden rushes and jubilant outbursts of sing-a-longs with a mixed feeling of happy nostalgia, or lush string arrangements carrying that same bittersweet mood.
Other tracks are just plain musically happy, like ‘Yellow Line’, whilst the lyrics seem to cry misery (although I’m not sure exactly what to do with ‘I know you rather see me on the yellow line’), or the album last track, the bouncing ‘Slip John’ which breaks up into quiet moments before starting with even more sunny parts of joyous piano and percussion.
The whole album cultivates unity but also diversity, as surprisingly, there is a gypsy-like acoustic guitar ambiance for ‘Hole in the sky’ which seems to be about the loss of a parent, because of the warm and heart-breaking vocal harmonies singing ‘There’s a hole in the sky/Where my father waits for me/I was not ready’, before fading in an Irish dance for only a few seconds, the only indication of the album revealing Pat’s nationality.
Go to this website to listen to ‘The Great Divide’, it is bright and dark, but the sunny side of the music is always victorious.