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CMU Approved
Approved: DIIV
By Aly Barchi | Published on Monday 10 September 2012
Brooklyn band DIIV – who like outsized blouses, novelty cereals and cumulous indie music – have at their artistic heart the songwriting of one Zachary Cole Smith, also guitarist in Beach Fossils.
The band’s debut LP ‘Oshin’, released via Captured Tracks in June, has something of an impenetrable, unknowable quality to it, with a tendency to skirt the vague shape of, say, a ‘definitive chorus’, rather than actually present one. To listen to the LP en masse is to experience a tide whose waves barely break, but merely cascade back and forth as track fades into track (into track, into track).
Which isn’t to say it all sounds the same, or that the surge is unstructured; ‘Air Conditioning’ and ‘Doused’ are dark, strict and stilted, while the silvered guitar scales in ‘Past Lives’ and ‘How Long Have You Known’ shine and shiver in an air of rosy spontaneity.
You can take in three shades of DIIV via the videos for ‘Doused’ and ‘How Long Have You Known’, and a clement new Memory Tapes remix of ‘Oshin’ track ‘Follow’.
