Review Summary: niice
In all honesty,
Frog in Boiling Water has been confusing me ever since its release. It is few things, and it is many things: above all, however, it is a great album - that’s not where the confusion lies. Rather, the fact that DIIV’s fourth LP is easy to describe yet hard to pin down can be identified as the culprit: I could say “good shoegaze album nice atmosphere” and that’d be as accurate a description as you’ll get. At the same time, positioning “good shoegaze album nice atmosphere” within the context of DIIV as a band and shoegaze as a genre… yeah, yikes. I’ll try.
Right: DIIV have been a little underwhelming for most of their career. They’ve always put out good-not-great records while moving further from their beach fossilised origins with each release. To me, they’re a band whose image and, sure,
vibe was ahead of their actual music right up to 2019’s
Deceiver: DIIV’s most drawn-out, patient and, admittedly, traditional album to date. It showed a shoegaze band discovering the general rule that
more reverb = more good about a decade into their career, and most importantly, it seemed like this more atmospheric approach suited Zachary Cole Smith’s voice and songwriting better than anything prior. As such,
Frog in Boiling Water perfecting this newfound love for, uh, let’s call it
normiegaze makes sense, but it still seems like no one anticipated DIIV to make an album this consistent, this entrancing, this
good... cuz, ya know, they’re pushing 40 and all that.
Enough reason to get excited, no? No… yes? Maybe? This is shoegaze we’re talking about here: we can’t lift up our heads too high even though I’m a size nine.
Frog in Boiling Water, at face value, sounds deeply unexciting if enjoyable. It’s a shoegaze album: guitars fuzz, drums loop, vocals are vaguely buried. Most (least?) strikingly, its ten tracks require patience: there’s hooks and choruses to be found here, but they’re understated and a little shy to reveal themselves. At first, it’s hard to distinguish different moments: everything blurs together into a wonderful, floaty mass - there’s no standout moments, hell, there’s not even a
the long song. However, the primary memorable thing about the album is its atmosphere: it’s dark, it’s ethereal, it’s
shoegaze, dammit. And it ensures you keep coming back. And once it’s dug its eight front toes in, things get a little exciting. A little.
Sure, it may have taken a while, but it’s hard to not be enraptured by how “Raining on Your Pillow”s cutesy bleep-bloops aid its haunting, hypnotising aura. It becomes clear how
sticky Smith’s one-liners are, somehow avoiding cliche through sheer conviction and dedication to the atmosphere - “
I want to disappear”, “
I’m on my way out”. It’s nearly impossible not to be mesmerised by the wonderful production subtly highlighting each instrument throughout - best exemplified by an excellent bassline stealing the show in “Soul-net” in spite of the song’s mesmerising riffs. Crucially: tracks reveal themselves to possess an identity beyond vaguely pleasant and pleasantly vague…
…however,
Frog in Boiling Water remains a shoegaze album, and a predictable one at that. At the same time, it’s special because it’s a great-not-good DIIV album, sure, but I would argue that it’s also fairly special for its unrelenting consistency: there is no dip in quality at any point, and while no song is earth-shatteringly amazing, there’s something (quite a lot, it seems) to be said for a record of nothing but great tracks. This really is a good shoegaze album with a nice atmosphere - but it’s also a little more than that. And it doesn’t seem to care about any of it: the h2o is getting quite hot and there are loafers to be seen.
