Maddy Costa 

Diiv: Oshin – review

This Brookyln quartet's songs sound dreamily beguiling one at a time, but as an album it all feels rather muddled, writes Maddy Costa
  
  


Pick a song, any song, on the debut album from Brooklyn quartet Diiv and it's likely you'll be momentarily dazzled by its glistening distillation of dream pop. You might pick Air Conditioning, whose twin guitars set off on a cross-country track, scampering and clambering through sun-dappled forests, with bass and drums maintaining solid, fertile ground beneath them. You might pick Human, where frontman Z Cole Smith's exuberant vocal shimmers amid gushing streams of guitar. Or perhaps Earthboy, which does the scampering, sun-dappled, shimmering, gushing thing, but throws in an intriguing glassy clattering sound, which might be trains rushing past or someone rattling a box full of beer bottles ready for recycling. The trouble with listening to these songs en masse is that each one blurs into the next, making the whole unmemorable. It's not landfill indie so much as cloud-formation indie: a sequence of beautiful shapes, billowing magnificently, only to blow away on the breeze.

 

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