Album Review: DIIV – ‘Is The Is Are’


Is The Is Are




Releasing pop albums longer than 60 minutes these days is a bold move given that attention spans barely survive those rankling YouTube adverts before fingers are smiting down upon the mouse to ‘Skip Intro’.

Yet four years on from their debut ‘Oshin‘, and throwing caution to itchy digits, New York’s DIIV have come up with ‘Is The Is Are‘, a blissful sail of a double-album that clocks in at 63 minutes across 17 tracks.

Frontman Zachary Cole Smith‘s time spent in between records reads like a roll call of bad boy-musician clichés; drugs, arrests, rehabs, sacking a drummer because of drugs, a model girlfriend, and more drugs.

Though he’s less rock star and more hip-star in a giant t-shirt, baseball cap and slacks. To look at him and his well-preened hair, it’s no surprise he’s strutted Parisian catwalks when not making music.

There are two ways to listen to ‘Is The Is Are’. One is to let Smith’s hazy vocals mingle down into the rapid, metronomic drumming, the precisely picked guitar lines and driving bass all held inside a fat shell of reverb. This is rewarding enough in itself – the tunes are a rich basket of melodies (‘Out Of Mind‘, ‘Loose Ends‘ and ‘Healthy Moon‘ to name three) pulled and plucked from shoegazers’ laces and darkwavers’ mascaraed eyelashes.

The other way is to pick out Smith’s lyrics, no simple task given the gossamery production (Smith self-produced the album because he’s a self-confessed “control freak”), and listen to the drug references that pepper it.

He’s never shied away from speaking about his heroin habit and is explicit on ‘Dopamine‘ (“buried deep in a heroin sleep and floating deeper underground”) to the point of it being disturbing, even if he does say he’s free from it now.

Smith drowsily sings, “And I lost you when you said one hit couldn’t hurt” on ‘Bent (Roi’s Song)‘, a track dealing with friends going through the same addiction. ‘Valentine‘, a particular highlight, pumps that drum beat found on half of 1980s chart songs (think ‘Footloose‘, ‘Modern Love‘ and ‘Close To Me‘) as heavy lines like, “Burn it down and give it up/You never want to give it up”, come out in the detached manner of Kurt Cobain on ‘Something In The Way‘.

He often cites Cobain as a main influence, and with similarities in hair, choice of chemical stimulant and a blonde singer girlfriend, it’s easy, and a journalist’s dream, to make comparisons that thankfully for Smith’s longevity appear superficial.



Sky Ferreira, Smith’s girlfriend, even pops up on ‘Blue Boredom‘, heaving a breathy come-to-bed voice that has Sonic Youth‘s ‘Tunic (Song For Karen)‘ fingerprints all over it, only less gritty.

(Fuck)‘ has the beginnings to a dark dive into somewhere that ends up nowhere due to an 18-second existence, but it’s a lone, nugatory blot on the record that, if you’re looking for a strip of silver lining, serves to highlight the high consistency of everything else.

While not too aesthetically dissimilar to its predecessor ‘Oshin’ — it’s still stuck in the same sounding pop dream — ‘Is The Is Are’ is an altogether beautiful piece of craft from beginning to end.

Sad if you think about it too much, happy if you don’t. A bit of both does it best. Normally, alarm bells should howl in your head when a songwriter says they have written an album about their drug struggles, like Smith has with this. He says he’ll always make “drug music” because that’s how his thoughts work. If that be the case, however troubling, then Polonius’ wordly advice to his son in Hamlet springs to mind.

“To thine own self be true”, DIIV, and you’ll never make a bad record.

(Steven White)


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