The Divine Chord — The Avalanches ft. MGMT, Johnny Marr
Diving into the The Avalanche’s spacey track with unlikely collaborations, nostalgia, and the most romantic story you’ll ever hear…
The Avalanches are an Australian duo formed by Robbie Charter and Tony Di Biasi in 1997. They’re classed as an electronic music group but genuinely — as someone who’s not keen on electronic music in general — I’d say they make the genre much more accessible by using samples and collaborations. That’s their trademark, but with their latest album — the brilliant We Will Always Love You released in December 2020 — they went for more mainstream guests like Karen O, Blood Orange, Jamie XX and the two collaborators for the song we’re discussing today: The Divine Chord ft. MGMT and Johnny Marr.
When I first listened to The Divine Chord I was surprised to see Johnny Marr’s name on the credits. But a few (read: at least once a day) plays later, I can definitely hear his guitar parts nicelly intertwined with the spacey vibe of the track. However, no disrespect to Marr, but I feel like The Divine Chord screams MGMT from start to finish.
“After they had that massive album [‘Oracular Spectacular’ released in 2008], which was all those big hits and then, from that, they were almost the biggest band in the world for some time — and then they took a big left turn after that and it’s really admirable to do something like that. It’s so ballsy. We really respect stuff like that.” — Tony for Clash
The melancholic lyrics are Andrew VanWyngarden’s [MGMT vocalist] doing and, according to Robbie, they were inspired by a heartbreak the American singer went through. You can definitely sense loss in the lyrics, but I feel like the upbeat lyrics and the choir voices — recorded by the Yarra Voices Chord — transforms it into nostalgia which is a nice nod to the sample used on the song:
“I think I was just drawn to the very first line when he sings, ‘I still remember you.’ To me that said so much. Because sampling plays with time and remembering voices from the past, and when he sung that line I thought, ‘This is going to work.’” — Tony to Apple Music
Which takes me to the sample: the doo-doos you can hear on the track were taken from The Shirelles’ It’s Love That Really Counts, from 1962. The all-girl group reached their peak pre-Motown era and were the first girl group to have a number one track on the Hot 100 in the US, back in 1961.
And there is more female energy to the Avalanches work with the album that contains The Divine Chord. In an interview to Rolling Stone Italy, Tony shared the hair-raising story behind the cover of We Will Always Love You, featuring writer, producer, and director Ann Druyan who produced the series Cosmos with her husband, Carl Sagan.
She and Sagan worked together on NASA’s Voyager Golden Record, a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing a variety of natural sounds, spoken greetings in several languages, and a 90-minute selection of ethnic music. It was to be launched into space and portray human life on Earth to any form of alien intelligence that would come to find it. Some of these recordings can be heard on another track of the album, Wherever You Go, and several other artists have made reference to it.
One of these sound included on the Voyager Golden Record was Ann Druyan’s heartbeat, recorded on the same day that her husband, Sagan, proposed to her. The record was inserted in the space probes of 1977’s Voyager Programme and launched into space. And now the heartbeat of a woman in love floats in space for eternity.
