10. Is The Is Are / DIIV

Immersive and sprawling, DIIV's sophomore effort, Is The Is Are, is a dreamy guitar record that washes over listeners, wave after wave.  The songs drift and morph, revealing layers of sumptuous sound, with an emphasis on shape and texture and blissed-out vibes.  Brooklyn's Zachary Cole Smith self-produced and recorded the album, inviting his audience to submerge themselves in his lead guitar, which is always chiming, ringing, and glorious.

Inspired by late 80s shoegaze and 90s power-pop, Smith worships the woozy guitar lick as he winds his lines through the record, fluid and hypnotic.  The lack of dynamic range is purposeful.  Smith wants to envelop listeners rather than hit or hook them, producing ribbons of dreamlike texture.  With his vocals usually buried deeper in the mix, listeners must dive to uncover their meaning.  Their lyrical content, of course, are less important than serving the form and feel of the songs, another sonic element meant to elude listeners for awhile.

Is the Is Are is like a novel that almost reveals itself after chapters weaving through time and space, only to leave its inscrutable meaning forever out of reach.  The ideal forms of life cannot be touched, it seems, always just beyond our grasp.  After 17-songs, Smith's record sounds like romance slipping through our fingers.

Literary aside: this concept reminded me of that great scene in Conrad's Lord Jim, where the wealthy merchant and "learned collector" Stein attempts to illuminate Jim's fate in life during a conversation with the narrator Marlow.  "A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea."  Surrounded by "his cabinet of butterflies, beautiful and hovering under the glass of cases of lifeless wings," Stein is forever bedeviled by unfulfilled romance (much like Jim).  And like his butterflies, the beauty in life is apparent but the romantic ideal, once pinned down, is forever elusive.  Thus, at the end of his conversation with Marlow, Stein "sighed and turned again to the glass case.  The frail and beautiful wings quivered faintly, as if his breath had for an instant called back to life that gorgeous object of his dreams."