DIIV – Frog In Boiling Water: Review

An extension of Deceiver’s heavier grunge-shoegaze sound, DIIV’s ten gathered songs here live up to its titular portents.

The rationale behind an album’s title isn’t something you should always spend a ton of time understanding, but it’s useful to unpack the thinking behind DIIV’s Frog In Boiling Water to better appreciate the Brooklynites’ present state of mind.

Neither is it our normal business to flat quote a press release either, but if you can’t improve on the original text, then this will do: “If you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will of course frantically try to clamber out.”

“But if you place it gently in a pot of tepid water and turn the heat on low, the frog will sink into a tranquil stupor, exactly like one of us in a hot bath, and before long, with a smile on its face, it will unresistingly allow itself to be boiled to death…We are the frogs.”

Quite. It’s been five years since the quartet’s last release, Deceiver, and twelve since their dream-pop indebted debut Oshin, and whilst DIIV’s story is not entirely that of their singer Zachary Cole Smith, his personal struggles with addiction over the years have often threatened to overshadow it.

Heavily symbolic title aside, Frog In Boiling Water nearly didn’t get made as, four years of internecine squabbles into the process, it took a last chance to save the band meeting that resulted in enough accord to get the job done. An extension of Deceiver’s heavier grunge-shoegaze sound, the ten gathered songs here live up to its titular portents.

Whilst the latter movement has undergone a renaissance that has surprising longevity, all attempts to revive the former have sounded hollow, but the hybrid approach to opener In Amber gives it enough chances; Cole’s vocals dwell low in the mix, whilst a My Bloody Valentine-esque wall of sound otherwise will inevitably bring comparisons with Loveless to bear.

Half-a-decade is a helluva long time in music of course, and eyebrows were raised when it was announced that the asinine Fred Durst was appearing in the video for Brown Paper Bag, but its dreamy, doomy shuffle has Cole referencing some so-sad-you’re-smiling moments amidst the FX (‘Cost me nothing to say/My mind’s at ease/When I’m in pain’).

Frequently amidst the sweet is the bitter: On Soul-net, waves of distortion are held together more or less by an isolated drumbeat, the deepening overload smothering lines that cut to the heart of millennial angst (‘We were lost/Now we have something/They own our lives/And harvest our suffering’).

Certainly the accusations sometimes made of ‘gaze as a form’ – lack of gravity, aesthetics over depth – are mostly off the mark here.

Everyone Out is also consciously softer, with tape loops and synthesizers providing the instrumentation, the subject feeling euphoric cynicism as they refuse to come of age in modern society’s SNAFU, praying instead for its destruction and a return to blissful adolescence.

The record’s core though lies in a twin salvo of what could be rudimentary stabs at somebody’s mainstream; on Somber The Drums the quiet-loud aesthetic and sky scraping riff feels at least willing to play nicely with others, whilst its companion Little Birds possesses a beautiful melancholia, its discernible non-fuzz notes rising up in peaceful separation.

In some ways Frog In Boiling Water functions true to its dystopian meta, as with it DIIV have created an immersive experience that’s difficult to break contact with.

If the great collapse is really on the way, then this at least is the record to soundtrack closing the curtains and hunkering down in willfully ignorant, escapist bliss.