The Band Explains: Pale Rivers -'August 6th'
Cork-based five-piece Pale Rivers chat to us about the ideas behind their arresting debut single and video, 'August 6th' due for release on April 14th 2017. Driven by electric guitars, 'August 6th' is a whirlwind of ambient electronic instrumentation, brooding lead vocals and haunting group vocals, becoming progressively more atmospheric, impassioned and evocative as it unfurls.
Pale Rivers Explains:
When we started writing ‘August 6th’, we didn’t have a clear indication of where it was headed, there was no definitive start/middle/end at that point, i think the idea was to just get a bunch of the ideas down first and make sense of it from there. Once we had the overall feel of it, it all came together pretty quick. We recorded it with producer Gavin Glass at his Dublin studio and there I think it really came to life, incorporating group vocals worked particularly well and also adding in a lot of ambient synths gave it the extra tone and mood it needed.
Lyrically the song is about the idea of different timelines or alternate versions of events and moments in a life. At the time of writing I was really fascinated by the Hugh Everett Parallel Worlds/ Parallel Lives theory, I found this really interesting and thought it could inspire a cool idea for the story of the song. I started writing sentences, and then this idea formed together, it’s about a number of different moments from a lifetime but what if they were all alternate versions of the same thing happening at the same time, each line of the verse indicates a memory or place, but I wanted it to be all somewhat sporadic, so there’s references that would indicate youth but also other parts that would nod towards adulthood, parenthood, adolescence etc, but all mixed up together to form a kind of mixed up picture of these different memories that a person would have.
Our friend Brendan Canty(Hozier/All Tvvins) made the video for this which was a really cool experience, we sent him over the song and he came up with the idea for the video from there. Everyone was shot separately, then he edited it together and built up all of the flashing imagery to make it quite intense as the song progressed from start to finish, somewhat representative of the pace of the songs lyrical references and the dynamics of the music as the song builds.
Accompanying this track is a Feel Good Lost (Hozier - Take Me To Church) directed video. (Warning: contains flashing imagery).
Feature by Karla Harris