Review by Stan Cierlitsky
DIIV are back with a stunning new album called Deceiver, out October 4 on Captured Tracks. The record, a refinement of the band's earlier efforts, may indeed be their most consistent release to date.
It seems to me that the band has done a lot of maturing over the course of three albums. Their debut Oshin came out back in 2012. It was very unpolished, and it sounded like a band trying to figure out their sound Yeah, everyone knows they had a C86-style mixed with flashes of Nirvana. Their original band name Dive even came from the name of a Nirvana song. Unfortunately, it was also the name of a Nineties era Belgian industrial group, so they had to change it.
On their second album, Is The Is Are, which came out in early 2016, their sound really started to develop. They didn't totally lose the C86 baseline, but you can easily hear The Cure and Echo & The Bunnymen in many of the songs. At this point, the band started to sound amazing.
Fast forward to 2019 and the band is all grown up and seems to have settled on a harder, shoegaze sound. It was no shock to see that the album was produced by Sonni Diperri who spent time engineering for bands like My Bloody Valentine and M83. Deceiver kicks off with a sonic assault. Opener "Horsehead" sets the tone for the rest of record. Singer Zachery Cole comes in sounding as lush as ever, but then the guitars kick in and Sonni Diperri turns it up to 11. That's not to say the songs aren't melodic. They are. And there are a lot of the signature pace changes one expects in the form. However, this new harder-edge shoegaze song reminds me a lot of the music of Nothing, one of my favorite modern bands that also employs a similar dynamic in their music.
The next song, "Like Before You Were Born", and the later track, "For The Guilty", are two of the strongest selections on Deceiver, and it clearly sounds like the band has spent some time studying the My Bloody Valentine back-catalog. And I mean that as a serious compliment. My Bloody Valentine put out perhaps the seminal shoegaze album in 1991 with Loveless. These two songs take that vibe and develops it further. DIIV have at least done more than simply mimic that earlier MBV-thing, since these two tunes here are strong, melodic, and original on their own.
I also wanted to mention that on several different places on the album I was reminded of the tunes of Bailter Space, the underrated New Zealand band. The first single, "Skin Game" actually does a great job bridging the gap from Is The Is Are (2016) to Deceiver (2019). To me, it would have fit better on Is The Is Are, but the song grows harder towards the end which really makes it fit well here. And this is the song which sounds, to me, the most like the band Nothing.
The second single, "Taker", feels more like Sonic Youth and Nirvana than anything by My Bloody Valentine. It's a hard charging cut. I even love the fact that as the song progresses a guitar-line comes in chiming and that's either going to remind you of The Cure, or, if you are Modest Mouse fanatic like me, you will instantly think of "The Whale Song".
My other favorite on the album is a song called "Between Tides", a number that reminded me a bit of something from the most recent Ride record. It starts out pretty lush and slow but then builds into a pretty epic sound. The last four songs on the album aren't bad, but they didn't really stand out that much for me.
Overall, Deceiver is another exciting album from DIIV. And it's an album that will probably sound amazing live. Speaking of seeing them live, you can check them out October 27th at The Black Cat. Details here.
Deceiver is out on Friday via Captured Tracks.
More details on DIIV via the band's official Facebook page, or via the band's official website.
[Photo: DIIV Facebook page]