DIIV (formerly DIVE): GLASSLANDS, BROOKLYN

DIIV’s Band leader Zachary Cole Smith’s quasi-unique sense of repetition and melody is (not) equal parts Ride (“Drive Blind” era), The Cure (circa Disintegration – probably the most referenced album of the year, see Lower Dens’ “Propagation”) and psychedelic krautrock  (Faust is a confessed influence) – all laced with obfuscated and reverberated vocals.

At the Glasslands, tonight, the band is leaving all its dreamy jingle jangling peers behind. DIIV is non-stop “Disintegration” on Vyvanse overdrive, sounding way more jagged than the record, with Smith and Andrew Bailey exchanging interludes on the guitars while Devin Ruben Perez (bass) and Colby Hewitt (drums) violently and precisely hold the tempo.
Everyone here tonight is  either dissolving into ” Wait” and “Sometime”  - two of the best songs of “Oshin”, the band’s debut LP by Captured Tracks (also home of the brilliant The Soft Moon) or rehearsing attempts at moshing during the dark, driving parts.

DIIV is a fast, feeble but somehow efficient response to the “questions” that Simon Reynolds, put on RETROMANIA  – after we downloaded all the songs, after we did all the revivals, where do we go from? what else there is to do?  Can we file this psychedelic/krautrock reconstruction of shoegaze married with Bushwick ab-ex visual fragments under REVIVAL?
Adding to the genre-confusion, at the end of the concert, Smith (who projects a much younger, more fragile version of Kurt Cobain) announces before the last song: “we don’t believe on encores, we’re a punk band”  and proceed to play “Doused”, their best song .yet.