DIIV
Frog in Boiling Water
FANTASY
Sometimes—scratch that: all the time—life works out for the best when we humans pause and reflect, relinquish control over aspects of our lives and let nature run its course. Two of the four founding members of Brooklyn shoegaze squad DIIV, lead vocalist/guitarist Zachary Cole Smith and guitarist Andrew Bailey, have a preternatural ability to do exactly that. They took their sweet time to develop their band’s identity and grow its sea legs after forming in 2011. Had Smith and Bailey harried their hopes to launch DIIV any sooner, the project might have disbanded in disgrace before gaining any recognition whatsoever, as DIIV’s founding bassist Devin Ruben Perez left the fold after posting on 4chan (need we say more?).
The aforementioned history of DIIV (pronounced like “nose dive,” or “dumpster dive”) is crucial to understanding the band’s fourth studio album, Frog in Boiling Water. The expression denotes that a frog initially put in a container of cold or lukewarm water won’t notice the incremental increase until the water starts boiling. The expression could apply just as easily to songs by DIIV (or “503,” as we like to call them). Already, Smith and company have raced thousands upon thousands of hurdles without coming close enough to brush against them. And as for the Biblically literate among us (or those who made it through Paul Thomas Anderson’s outlandish Magnolia), frogs raining down from the sky is a troubling occurrence, to put it mildly.
For their own part, DIIV don’t resign themselves to hopelessness either—even though they’d be justified to do so. And that’s largely due to the fact that the instrumentally eclectic and soulfully uplifting Frog in Boiling Water, specific as it may sound at times, leaves it up to each listener to evaluate the record through their own lens of biases, suppositions, and cynicism and reach their own conclusions. In fact, the best post-rock albums are usually the ones that let the listener make up their own mind. Because the genre’s adherents often keep their lyrics to a minimum—and they never succumb to the temptation of didacticism or arrogance—the fleet-footed Achilles’ heels (yes, he did have two) for any human being induces both a body high and a spiritual uplift that could last a lifetime.
