Deep Sea Diver are like a marriage of Angel Olsen and Arcade fire. A love, perhaps, that results in even more passionate guitars and vocals, so that their music is a visceral alternative rock experience like few others. Like both bands, there is an 80’s influence made modern by an alternative sensibility. It is almost Beatles-esque at times, the noble strain to hit just the right note, to add the perfect 7th or diminished chord. But it is harder and darker than all three acts.
Impossible Weight is a record for the battle weary. With all the things that Jessica Dobson has to deal with: being a woman who has to carry a “Switchblade” to and from her apartment, dealing with the “Impossible Weight” of other people’s expectations, being someone whose “Eyes Are Red” from the tiredness of life and responsibility, the songs are both heavy and real and offer hope and compassion for her travel companions.
The album starts on “Shattering the Hour Glass” with the question that frames the rest of the album: “Do I have to be strong enough?” The song, about the futile attempt to make the most of our time, ends with the exclamation, “You don’t have to be strong enough!” But the rest of the album is full of the testing of personal mettle, and comes out with some pretty sweet gems of perspective, learned from the trials life has thrown at Jessica.
It is something of a self help book, in fact, with lyrics like, “Don’t be afraid / Don’t be ashamed,” “Right where you are / Is right where you belong” and “Our hearts ignite when they beat together.” But with the ecstatic rock and the many confessions of despair and darkness, it is more like a hard-won journey towards the final song, “Run Away With Me,” where Jessica sings over just an acoustic guitar, “You gotta climb… / that mountain in your mind.”
After asking if she can be strong enough, Jessica and Deep Sea Diver accomplish an arduous climb. And it seems like the compassion for herself and the allowance for grief in the journey is what allowed her and the band to finish the monumental feat. This album shows the complexity of life, that it doesn’t take 7 Habits of Highly Successful People, but just an honesty with self and an eye towards the goal while realizing, “Everything falls apart / and that’s ok.” The “impossible weight” of the title is the thing you need to let go of, to carry the difficult weight of what you’re actually able to. A perspective, couched in beautifully passionate rock, some of us certainly need, in order not to give up.
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