I wanted to write a killer first paragraph to introduce this album. I wanted to instantly plunge you deep into the otherworld of swirling color and form suggested by its music. I wanted to grab you by the ears and hold you under its surface of sounds until you drowned, never relinquishing my grip until you were fully submerged in its self-created world of beauty.
But I didn’t have to, because the album itself does exactly that.
DIIV’s just-released debut Oshin is its own universe, one that perfectly harnesses the endless expanses and resonant depths of the open ocean as a life source for their vast and vibrant soundscapes, compositions that send listeners far beneath the shallow waves of shoegazey surf-rock into an entirely new realm of mesmerizing siren song.
Hey, that was pretty good.
But seriously, people. This is an album that may just blow your freaking mind.
When I say “surf-rock”, don’t be fooled. So many bands in the recent revival of the genre seem to rigidly adhere to the tightened-down tininess of the original studio surf bands of the 60s, for whom “surf-rock” merely implied the fast-paced, reverb-spiked punky riffing characteristic of their eccentric culture.
What DIIV has done here is something new entirely. Production is blown wide open, with lavish washes of reverb flooding the speakers, creating a sense of space. Yet it’s a weighty space, pressing in on the listener’s ears, their whole subconscious, drowning them in music, absorbing every possible strain of sound into itself like a sponge. In the hands of DIIV, surf-rock is no longer a stripped-down, small-scale studio affair, but a grand statement of texture and emotion, one that invites you to lose yourself completely in an ocean of nothing, an ocean of sound swirling within the deepest places of your own mind. Post-rock guitars reimagine the genre’s jangly riffs into a deluge of oceanic vibes, the simple beats barely tethering you to the reality of dry land, frontman Zachary Cole Smith’s voice sounding as if it were being radioed in from a distant submarine miles below the waves.
When I first saw this band at South By Southwest, I had never heard of them before, not even aware that they were on the setlist for the day party I was attending at the venue that day. Back then, they were a fledgling four-piece spelled D-I-V-E instead of D-I-I-V, memorable for Smith’s oversized clothing and striking resemblance to Eminem almost as much as for their instantly enticing brand of trancey guitar pop. At the time, however, the sound of Oshin was barely present, at least not in a live setting, where a tiny room full of tinny speakers reduced it to just a slightly more ambient version of the tuneful surf stylings of Beach Fossils. (Which, as I later discovered, is totally understandable because Zachary Smith is actually FROM Beach Fossils. Go figure.)
Eminem, right?
But given the freedom and resources of a full studio setup, DIIV, Dive, whatever they’re called, have exceeded all expectations, taking these deceptively simple guitar motifs to a whole new level, fleshing them out into a scintillatingly full sound the band claims was inspired by Krautrock, Nirvana, and ethnic guitar music from Mali. None of which it really sounds like much, but okay.
If there’s any term for this album’s sound, it would probably be something along the lines of “dream-surf”, “surf-wave”, “surf-gaze”… “dream-wave”. What the band has given us in Oshin is the musical equivalent of a deep-sea dive, delving into the mysterious waters that lurk below the choppy waves of your dime-a-dozen surf pop. Bright guitars on songs like “Wait” and “Sometime” move like shafts of light streaming in from the dappled waves of the sunlight zone down to the ocean floor, with Smith’s distant whale-song pulsating in and out over a majestic hum of distortion. Breaks between tracks sound not so much as an ending or a beginning as they do a resurfacing for air, breaking back into the sunshine above sea level only momentarily before sucking in your breath again to make a new, even deeper descent.
That’s not to say this album is entirely a textural, art-for-the-sake-of-art affair. This album has SONGS. Although about half the songs on the album are instrumentals, their deft guitar lines and bass work, such as those found on “(Druun)” and “Air Conditioning”, will still stick in your head regardless. And when they DO have words, let me tell you, it’s going to be nearly impossible for you to purge the simple vocal hook from “How Long Have You Known?” from your head after just two or three listens.
I don’t want to sink to the level of fanboy banner-waving here, don’t get me wrong. Maybe this is one of the albums of the year. It’s really good. Maybe it’s not. It has a flaw or two. But in the end, this is a really solid album from an up-and-coming, hard-working indie group who deserves to be recognized for the musical atmosphere they’ve managed to create here. I find almost no faults with Oshin. The lack of real lyrics doesn’t detract much from the quality of the album as a whole, mainly because the music is so pervasively soothing that it doesn’t even need words to hold you under its spell. With this record, DIIV has succeeded in adding a completely new dimension to guitar-based pop music, giving it as much depth and volume as the ocean that is the album’s namesake. I’m excited to see what the future has in store for the band. Hopefully the follow-up sees them employing even more accessible songwriting to further expand their sound.
But in the meantime, it’s worth your time to put this record on, sit out in the sun by the water, and just simply chill out to the beautiful music the band has created.
Take the plunge.
And remember – you heard it here!
RATING: A
RELEASED: June 26, 2012 on Captured Tracks
MUST-HEARS: All of them, but if I had to pick, I’d probably say “How Long Have You Known?”, “(Druun)”, “Air Conditioning”, “Doused”, “Past Lives”, “Wait”, “Earthboy”, “(Druun, Pt. II)”, “Follow”, “Sometime”…. okay, FINE, all of them.
DON’T FEEL BAD IF YOU SKIP: Feel like I should put another joke here about why you would be stupid to skip ANY of the tracks on this album, but I figure you’re pretty tired of that by now, right?
SOUNDS LIKE: The shoegazey guitars of The War On Drugs and Real Estate meets the atmospheric chillness of Washed Out meets the sound of the ocean itself.
PERFECT FOR: Losing yourself. (In the MUsic, the MOment, you OWN it… sorry, I’m… still hung up on the Eminem lookalike thing.)
IN A WORD: Mesmerizing.
Stream the whole album on Stereogum!
Watch the music video for “How Long Have You Known?” on YouTube!
– retnuH
Hear Here! 