Post industrial rock envelopes our foreboding demise

The collective melancholy of post-industrial rock, rises to the current epidemic of sadness that swarms us today. DIIV’s Frog in Boiling Water reflects on the ever present and foreboding collapse of our society, as well how its slow submersion has left us overbearing in an otherwise horrid disaster.

The breathy voice mimicking a lonely sound we all know: visible in grunge, sad rock, and even a hint of poetic anguish that is unmistakable in the 21st century zeitgeist. The guitar drowns us in a similar fashion of the band’s self described “billow like diaphanous drapery.” With doom on the horizon, the album sets the scene, a slow and sick burn turning the otherwise agile frog to a victim of a boiling pot. Our sickness of 21st century capitalism begins to escape in the album’s buzzing, heavy static, heavy industrial equipment, and drained voice that is visually present and haunting, but at the same time battling the musically depressive backdrop. The album itself perfectly captures a feeling all too familiar.

The album begins with a distant guitar humming in a gloomy afternoon, with very short and terse verses relying on its poetic phrasing. Song and title track, “Frog in Boiling Water,” encompasses lines of “you can see the world / with a gun in your hand,” as well as “Ivory Towers and Ivory Crosses / my livelihood is rotting,” to set the dismal but opulent scene. The album continues on this simple but profound metaphorical path with songs like “Brown Paper Bag ” describing their own personal disaster within “homes on fire” and “I torn and faded / stuck on the ground / down and wasted.” The heavy metaphors give all that is needed in short fashion, producing in itself a clarity of sluggish defeat and injured betrayal, ever present in the album’s message and tone.

Just with its own injury, viewers are met with induced hope and grandeur understanding of this pain. Enlightening songs like “Soul-Net” rave about the karmic feelings of our own prisons, and release the viewer in heavy guitar riffs reaching stratospheres with high octaves battling the low bass and drums. This continues throughout the album, especially in certain melodic and harmonic strumming of songs like “Everyone Out,” which opens with acoustic picking that mimics harp-like harmonics, against the usual heavy electric. These melodies carry the downtrodden singer across the album, giving bleeps of hope, as he bridges from his diaphragm the lonely lyrics of “I’m on my way out” in sorrowful but liberated fashion.

In essence, the album builds an internal post apocalyptic realm, bringing a mystical essence to our own pain and collective misery. The instruments and songs overflow into us, like the media today. This is only to be combated by moments of pure sincerity in the singer’s voice, a stripping of the mechanical. This revitalization of sound while preparing its similar theme builds a dying and desperate atmosphere that highlights DIIV’s musical talents and the album’s complexity. Overall, leading the audience to better understand hope and misery, to reflect on the scavenging world and a familiar melancholic landscape.