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**DIIV - Oshin**
★★★★☆

In the summer of 2012, while indie rock was busy eating itself alive with increasingly baroque arrangements and arch conceptual frameworks, a quartet of scruffy Brooklyn transplants quietly released one of the decade's most beguiling debuts. DIIV's "Oshin" arrived like a cool breeze through an open window, all shimmering guitars and narcotic drift, offering respite from the era's relentless musical maximalism.

The band's origins read like a fever dream of early 2010s Brooklyn cool. Zachary Cole Smith, fresh from his stint as touring bassist for Beach Fossils, had been crafting these gauzy instrumental sketches in his apartment, layering reverb-drenched guitars into hypnotic loops that seemed to exist in their own temporal bubble. When he recruited Andrew Bailey, Colin Caulfield, and Colby Hewitt to flesh out the sound, DIIV was born – initially as Dive, until legal issues forced the vowel-averse rechristening that would become their calling card.

Smith's vision was deceptively simple: create music that felt like "being underwater" or "floating in space." Drawing from the holy trinity of shoegaze – My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, and Ride – while filtering it through the sun-bleached aesthetics of California surf rock, DIIV crafted something that felt both nostalgic and utterly contemporary. This wasn't mere revivalism; it was sonic archaeology, unearthing forgotten frequencies and polishing them to a crystalline shine.

"Oshin" opens with the title track's aqueous guitar arpeggios, immediately establishing the album's hypnotic grammar. Smith's vocals, barely audible beneath layers of effects, function more as texture than narrative, his words dissolving into the mix like sugar in water. The genius lies in the album's ability to be simultaneously somnambulant and urgent – these aren't background sketches but fully realized compositions that reward both passive listening and deep immersion.

The album's crown jewel, "Doused," demonstrates DIIV's mastery of dynamics within limitation. Built around a simple chord progression that wouldn't sound out of place on a Ramones record, the track accumulates layers of melodic guitar lines that interweave like DNA strands, creating a wall of sound that's both massive and weightless. It's the kind of song that makes you understand why people fall in love with guitars in the first place.

"How Long Have You Known?" strips the formula down to its essence – a single guitar melody repeated with obsessive precision while Smith's voice drifts in and out of focus like a half-remembered dream. The track's six-minute runtime could feel indulgent in lesser hands, but DIIV understand that repetition isn't monotony when each cycle reveals new harmonic subtleties.

Elsewhere, "Human" injects a shot of urgency into the proceedings with its motorik rhythm section, while "(Druun)" – the album's sole instrumental – proves that DIIV's atmospheric prowess doesn't require vocals as a crutch. The closing "Oshin (Subsume)" serves as both epilogue and thesis statement, its extended outro dissolving into pure texture, as if the entire album is slowly sinking beneath the waves.

The production, handled by Smith himself, deserves particular praise. Every element exists in its own sonic space while contributing to the whole – Bailey's bass provides oceanic undertow, Hewitt's drums emerge from and disappear into the mix like tidal rhythms, and the multiple guitar layers create a sense of infinite depth. It's lo-fi without being sloppy, dreamy without being insubstantial.

A decade on, "Oshin" has aged remarkably well, its influence rippling through countless bedroom pop and dream pop acts who've absorbed its lessons about the power of restraint. While DIIV would later explore darker, more complex territories on subsequent releases, their debut remains their most cohesive statement – a 39-minute meditation on the beauty of getting lost.

In an era of playlist culture and shortened attention spans, "Oshin" argues for the album as immersive experience. It's music for long drives down empty highways, for staring at ceiling fans on hot afternoons, for those liminal moments when the world feels simultaneously infinite and intimate. Smith set out to create music that sounded like floating, and in that modest ambition, he achieved something approaching transcendence.