The High Divers
What: Rosewood Crawfish Festival
Where: Rosewood Avenue between Maple Street and Harden Street
When: Saturday, May 12, 11 a.m.-8 p.m.
Price: $10
More: rosewoodcrawfishfest.com
“I never thought that I would fall in love so fast,” sings Luke Mitchell, frontman for the Charleston-based band The High Divers, during the opening song on the group’s new sophomore LP, Chicora.
“Fall in Love so fast” is an organ-fueled charge of a rock song, built with the conciseness and melodicism of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers but ornamented with the inventiveness of a more cerebral indie rock band. It’s a sound that is, well, easy to fall in love with fast, particularly if it’s trumpeting across the open expanse of a festival setting.
“I love festivals; I think we all do as a band,” Mitchell offers. “I think that’s probably more where we shine, because you have a very limited amount of time usually, and we’re a very active band on stage. I think part of our strong suit is that we’re just really good live and we always have a lot of fun playing on big stages.”
The High Divers are a surprising band that often feels tailor-built for such stages. The four members are all from Hilton Head Island and made a joint decision to leave the cover band culture of the tourist mecca behind in favor of making original music in Charleston. They burst strongly onto the scene in 2014, with an enigmatic, rootsy sound and widescreen ambition that felt nothing short of inspired.
Of course, much of the band’s appeal also lies in the sheer gusto of Mitchell’s delivery — he’s got a deep, pliable voice that can flitter from country to soul to rock without being beholden to any one style, like the low-end vocal counterpart to My Morning Jacket’s Jim James. And like James, Mitchell is a more ardent student of the past greats than of modern-day re-inventors of popular music.
“I grew up listening and loving all this classic rock music that my parents were playing, and for my dad it goes even further back into, like, ’50s doo-wop and even older blues artists, so I was kind of steeped in that,” he explains. “I would say arriving at our sound has just been this amalgamation of different influences within the band and me just being really awesome at ignoring everything happening around me musically. I’m just terrible at it.”
He mentions a few bands — The War on Drugs, and Father John Misty among them — that he digs, but admits that “a lot of newer music doesn’t really do it for me all the time. I think I’m kind of pretty biased towards it.”
Mitchell credits the other bands members as well as producer Wolfgang Zimmerman for bringing in a wider range of influences into the group’s music. And for all of the frontman’s pointed traditionalism, there’s a spirited sense of adventure to the band’s tunes, whether it’s the sly flashes of instrumental prowess or, as is the case on the new album, the use of evocative synthesizers and drum pads that brings a definite ’80s vibe to the proceedings.
“Corey Campbell from SUSTO brought over a couple of Moog things and some of his keyboards and just left them at our house for a while,” Mitchell says of the new sounds on the record. “I got to play around with them and really see how much of their own instrument that they are. You know, when you’re not using a keyboard that has like a shitty synth patch, it sounds much more like it’s an own instrument. I think we had a lot of fun kind of getting to know synths and using them and incorporating them in our music more than I ever have [before], because I’m usually very focused on organic, natural sounds.”
For all of the new fangled toys, Chicora nicely expands and expounds upon the band’s core strength at crafting tight, memorable, rock tunes with soaring hooks. Their catalog and live show have many folks pegging them as a group that could take advantage of the gradual rise of fellow Charleston indie/Americana favorites SUSTO, the headliner at this year’s Rosewood Crawfish Festival. The High Divers often find themselves playing with SUSTO on festival dates throughout the Southeast.
“We love them to death and we’ve been huge supporters of their music just as they have for us,” he says, noting the members of both bands share the same Charleston abode. “I think anything they do just gives us hope. I think they’ve shown every band around here that you can kind of go for it and do it and, like, ‘it’s going to be OK, just keep working your ass off.’”
The High Divers perform on the Bud Light Stage at 4:30 p.m. Set times for the other 16 acts playing this Saturday are available at the Rosewood Crawfish Festival website.
LowCo Confluence
As it reliably does, this year’s Rosewood Crawfish Festival offers an intriguing sampler of groups currently making waves on the South Carolina music scene. Particularly strong this year is the contingent of bands making their way up from Charleston. In addition to The High Divers, you should also check out these two Lowcountry acts whose renown seems sure to escalate in 2018. — Jordan Lawrence
SUSTO — Bud Light Stage,
6 p.m.
Last month, at the High Water Festival in North Charleston, SUSTO flexed its big-stage appeal more convincingly than I’ve ever seen before, using Justin Osborne’s intimate and unflinchingly honest revelations about difficult realities of life in the South as the spark for performances that bridged bounding country-rock and moody, Southern gothic folk. As the “next big thing” for Palmetto State music, the band has never been more convincing.
She Returns From War —
First Citizens Stage, 1:30 p.m.
On Mirrored Moon Dance, her upcoming third album leading She Returns From War, Hunter Park proves her songwriting has possibilities beyond the prickly, post-Bright Eyes folk-rock of her previous outings, With the new collection, her purposefully throaty croon pushes into sheeny indie-pop; reverb-rich, ’60s-indebted power-pop and broken-down alt-country ballads, and other variations, all while remaining just as raw and emotionally honest as ever.
