Release Date: 17th March 2023

Recently featured in issue 16 of Emerging Rock Bands magazine, this internet-formed, multi-national six-piece Quiver make their entry into the musical arena via this eponymous EP. 

They’re a band in a hurry, and they certainly don’t wait for you to open the door either; immediately coming crashing through it on powerful title track (and recent single release) My Kinda Woman.The song is a pleasing, up tempo stomp, and the band certainly make their classic rock influences almost immediately audible via the AC/DC-like controlled shriek of the lead vocal (the attention-grabbing Rodrigo Oliveira). Helpfully, he’s backed on the opening track with nice chunky power chords and harmonizing that could put the Eagles in their pomp to shame. 

While Oliveira remains a continual power through the whole record, the rest of the band makes its presence felt a number of times – the rhythm section, for example, really thrives in dragging forward the pleasing chugger that is All Or Nothing. Fooled Me, up next, has all the histrionic elements of the best of glam, once again led by a shrieking, insistent vocal but with the band now picking up the pace as well, really feeling like an absolute crushing machine of rock; all parts beginning to warm up and lock themselves perfectly into sync. Building up a head of steam at the halfway point, Quiver’s machine continues its run towards warp speed with the next track, Alrighty Then; an insistent ‘cmon!’ leading us into a pounding drum beat and a riotous, speeding rock stomp that wouldn’t be out of place in any road trip playlist – and this road trip has the accelerator welded down. 

Quiver is a band of experienced musicians, and this begins to show as the record enters its second half. For lesser bands, the warp-speed of the previous two tracks would be toeing the line of threatening to rock you out; but for Quiver, the band’s experience and understanding of the psychology of album listening shine through, as they now drop the pace and power for just long enough to let their versatility and multi-talented instrumentalists shine, swapping the all-out rock for a velvet-voiced, soulful, pallet-cleansing smooth jam in Fade Away, before rising right back up with Where I Belong, a song full of yearning and romance, that on repeated listens, feels increasingly not just like an album closer, but a potential gig closer, not to mention an arena filler. 

So, what to make of the globetrotters’ first release? The word that kept coming to mind was ‘refreshing’, if only because, in an age where it feels like everyone is trying to reinvent the wheel, it’s a pleasure to listen to a record like Quiver’s – a band suffering no identity crisis, unapologetically presenting itself as believers in the Frasier character Roz Doyle’s maxim of “for your information, classic rock is both classic and it rocks!” If this is what that feeling results in, they’ll get no argument nor complaints from this reviewer. Quiver, particularly in it’s second half, is a straight ahead, honest to goodness, rock and roll party, and based on this, I’m going looking for an invite.