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"When you play an unfinished song live, it's obvious where the problems are," says singer-guitarist Harrison Rapp, huddled with his bandmates around a table at a Mexican restaurant on Northeast Killingsworth Street. "You feel it in the room. Everyone else is in the band, too. They just don't know it."
Well, whatever works. And judging by Hello Hello, the crowdsourcing method works well for Divers. At a time when the cultural tides are receding from rock 'n' roll, Divers has made the kind of record that used to inspire bored kids in dead-end towns to pick up guitars and scream their way out, full of shout-along choruses, bleeding-heart melodies and songs about locking arms and charging into the dying light of the world. It's the stuff of Springsteen, played like the Replacements and recorded with the sweaty urgency of a band that came up through basement shows and generator parties in the desert outside Las Vegas, where Rapp, his guitarist brother Seth and drummer Colby Hulsey grew up. If Sleater-Kinney made the first great Portland album of 2015, Hello Hello is the second. And it was in the works for nearly as long, even though it plays with the immediacy of a record written and recorded yesterday.
You'd think guys who have no problem showing half-completed songs to the public really would churn out an album in a single afternoon. And to a degree, that is how Divers operates. It's basically their origin story: A year after the end of their previous project, the Rapps and Hulsey reconvened on a whim to open a show at bassist James Deegan's house. "We were like, 'Let's see if we can write five or six songs in two weeks,'" Harrison Rapp says. "We never quit doing it." So it's not that the band members are precious about their writing process—they're just heavy editors. "We're perfectionists in the long run," Rapp says. "But the process starts way somewhere else."
In 2012, Divers introduced itself with a two-song 7-inch. Almost right afterward, it began working up the 10 tracks that make up Hello Hello. With the Occupy movement still ongoing at the time, Harrison Rapp found himself reflecting on one of his childhood preoccupations: classic American outlaws such as John Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde. Although he didn't intend to give the album a narrative, much of Hello Hello is sung from the perspective of two bank robbers on the run. Rapp's voice shakes with rasped desperation on anthems like "Lacuna" and "Breathless," as if he's the one being chased, the roaring guitars acting as his getaway vehicle. Despite the years of labor that went into it, the album captures the visceral energy of Divers' live show. "The initial thing was to be sloppy and just let everything out," Rapp says. "The flipside of that was, what we were actually going to keep, we were very meticulous about."
After setbacks unrelated to creative fussiness—a bad mastering job, delays at the vinyl pressing plant—Hello Hello is finally coming out, as a split release from Olympia's Rumbletowne and Portland's Party Damage Records. The band is now in the unfamiliar position of being "between albums." It's hoping to increase productivity, which is why it's returning to the old days of road-testing works still in progress. But switching gears-—from endless refinement to creative free-for-all—isn't easy.
"The initial thing was not giving a shit and just writing a ton of songs," Rapp says. "We have to get back into that mode, which is a real switch once you get into that nit-picky thing. It can be hard to change back. That's kind of where we're at now."
Deegan puts it another way: âYouâve got to get a turd to polish first.â
SEE IT: Divers plays High Water Mark Lounge, 6800 NE Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., with Pageripper, Marriage + Cancer and Thin Coat, on Sunday, Feb. 15. 8 pm. $5. 21+.
WWeek 2015