Oshin

by 
AlbumJun 26 / 201213 songs, 40m 24s
Dream Pop Indie Surf
Popular Highly Rated

Purchase physical LP/CD/Cassette via the label store www.omnianmusicgroup.com/collections/captured-tracks/products/oshin One part THC and two parts MDMA; the first offering from DIIV chemically fuses the reminiscent with the half-remembered building a musical world out of old-air and new breeze. These are songs that remind us of love in all it’s earthly perfections and perversions. A lot of DIIV’s magnetism was birthed in the process Mr. Smith went through to discover these initial compositions. After returning from a US tour with Beach Fossils, Cole made a bold creative choice, settling into the window-facing corner of a painter’s studio in Bushwick, sans running water, holing up to craft his music. In this AC-less wooden room, throughout the thick of the summer, Cole surrounded himself with cassettes and LP’s, the likes of Lucinda Williams, Arthur Russell, Faust, Nirvana, and Jandek; writings of N. Scott Momaday, James Welsh, Hart Crane, Marianne Moore, and James Baldwin; and dreams of aliens, affection, spirits, and the distant natural world (as he imagined it from his window facing the Morgan L train). The resulting music is as cavernous as it is enveloping, asking you to get lost in its tangles in an era that demands your attention be focused into 140 characters.

8.3 / 10

DIIV's compelling debut album is a gorgeous and unusually melodic dream-pop record built around verses and choruses that are unusually fluid and intuitive.

B

What’s often forgotten in the inevitable march of progress is that today’s good ideas don’t have to go bad. Once a trend’s heat passes, its better innovations might settle into a new variety of classic cool. In Brooklyn’s DIIV, the music of the post-punk and shoegaze eras abandons the lens of nostalgia for the thrill…

8 / 10

A dreamily reverb-heavy debut with a compelling depth that marks DIIV out as more than just another bunch of cute, well-connected Brooklynites.

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, there was a high tide of bittersweet, beach-inspired indie pop bands such as the Drums, Surfer Blood, and Beach Fossils, whose Zachary Cole Smith helmed the likeminded Diiv (originally known as Dive, but Cole changed the project's spelling after learning of the Belgian band of the same name).

8.0 / 10

After a bevy of 7-inch releases, incendiary live shows, and blog hype that's gradually built to a fever pitch, DIIV have at last delivered their debut LP, Oshin.

8 / 10

This dreamy, surf-pop debut comes from the touring guitarist of Beach Fossils, Z. Cole Smith.

8.0 / 10

'Oshin' by Diiv album review on Northern Transmissions. 'Oshin' is now available on Captured Tracks

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

70 %

81 %

4.0 / 5

DIIV - Oshin review: Please God, no more flubbed portmanteaus.

8 / 10