DIIV – ‘Oshin’

An exciting release from the blissed-out bringers of woozy rock’n’roll

Fuck off the real world. Fuck off illness. Fuck off the train. Fuck off newspapers. Fuck off other people. Fuck off music you have to think about. Fuck off the recession. Fuck off five-a-day. Fuck off Poundland. Fuck off Twitter. Fuck off music that’s in a hurry. Fuck off trying to know everything about everything then forgetting it all anyway. Right now, fuck off anything that isn’t the woozy Washed Out/How To Dress Well/War On Drugs glory that is DIIV – blissed-out bringers of woozy rock’n’roll who aren’t into the everyday, the mundane, the normal, but are into (sound the bullshit alarm!) “dreams of aliens, affection, spirits and the distant natural world”.

But you know what? Sometimes that’s exactly what you need: for an insular kid called Zachary Cole Smith, who doesn’t even want to know who Mark Zuckerberg is, to show you the sounds he hears inside his brain on a debut album called ‘Oshin’. For Smith and his buddies from Brooklyn to help you float away from this world to another on the trippy majesty of ‘How Long Have You Known?’, on the hiss and fuzz of ‘Wait’, on the dreamy hell of ‘Earthboy’ – all songs that take their own precious time to get where they’re going, and do so with the precision of a military operation. Drums and guitars smothered with reverb, vocals distorted to mesmerise and hypnotise.

It’s easy to tell when music’s been made in isolation, disengaged from reality. ‘Sometime’ is not a song that cares about the price of a pint of milk, it cares about making you feel like you’re underwater. The bass throb and vocal chant of ‘Doused’ were not recorded to document happenings in New York City, they were recorded with hours of nothingness in mind. Time to lose yourselves, readers.

To forget everything else and remember: you don’t need the real world, and the real world doesn’t need you. But DIIV need you, and you sure as hell need DIIV.

Tom Howard

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