Married To Your Ghost

The St. Louis-based band the Dive Poets lives in the in-between: positioned somewhere between rock & roll and country-flecked folk, the band plays songs about walking the divide between hope and heartbreak, elation and desolation. On the new album Married to Your Ghost, the Dive Poets navigate phantoms, bad dreams and the limits of freedom in a series of songs that ultimately celebrate a kind of hard-won happiness. Singer, songwriter and guitarist Eric Sargent incorporates source material that reads like a college-level syllabus, but his interpretive powers keep these songs rooted in honest, evocative storytelling. Eudora Welty's A Worn Path gets retold on The Ballad of Phoenix Jackson, while Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh provided the seed for the fixated, frustrated narrator in For Now. Nods to everyone from William Shakespeare to William Carlos Williams pop up, and the band funnels it all into driving, nuanced rock & roll that bears traces of folk, country and pop music. On Married to Your Ghost, Sargent's rhythm guitar and well-crafted lyrics hold the center of the songs, and his five bandmates give the necessary style and muscle. Guitarist Karl Eggers and violist Anna Drexelius use their instruments to cut alternatingly barbed and elegiac lines around these songs, which are anchored by the steady, driving rhythm section of Jeff York (bass) and Renato Durante (drums). Christian Schaeffer joined the Dive Poets early into the recording process and fills in the creases with warm electric piano and supple, bubbling Hammond organ. 'This Barroom Ain't No Place to Talk (Like We Gotta Talk) gives a good impression on why the Dive Poets were voted St. Louis' best country band in the 2012 Riverfront Times Music Awards, as sharp viola lines and honky-tonk piano chords outline the contours of a relationship's final moments. Elsewhere, the brash and raw My Papa's Song and the diaphanous Cherokee Nights find the Dive Poets pushing through tension or letting it simmer.