Shows: DIIV @ Emo's offers a surprising - and effective - conceptual flair

(All photos by Nicole Berlin Photography)

Goes without saying, for probably about anyone reading this, that indie rock + midsize venue doesn’t typically = “show with a conceptual bent.” See an artist of the persuasion and stature of Brooklyn-born DIIV, and you might get a wild, intriguing or curious intro video. Then, for the rest of the night, you might get some weird projected images serving as a backdrop, with only the vaguest notion of a thought-provoking theme. A lot of times, of course, you don’t even get that much: You’ll take that projected band logo as a static backdrop, and you’ll like it, because this tour’s on a budget, and anyway, it’s all about the music, bro. (Sorry — bruh.)

So to see DIIV, one of shoegaze’s brightest stars, integrate an hour and a half of their best and newest stuff with a full-fledged, video-augmented concept of sorts — an amusing and appropriate one, in fact — made for a refreshing Friday night performance at Emo’s, in addition to a sufficiently energetic and well-played one.

Ninety minutes of nothing but Zachary Cole Smith’s quartet and their music would have worked, too. But to transfer the thematic bent of the band’s new album, Frog In Boiling Water, to a series of comedic, dystopian, low-def videos reeking of the cult recruiting tools used by the likes of Heaven’s Gate … well done, dudes. And none of it marred the pace of the band’s program or took away from the music, nor vice versa.

A solemn, couple-minutes-long intro video with an unidentified, mild-mannered middle-aged dude set the tone. He promised that what was to come was “not just a concert. It’s a transformative experience.” Then we learned the performance would be “a gateway to a new dimension of existence — a celebration of life and its limitless possibilities. Embrace this moment — for after tonight, you may not recognize the person you once were. Let the music guide you, transform you and elevate you to heights beyond your wildest imagination.”

Once this superficially unthreatening videotaped figure got around to introducing DIIV, the band kicked off with “In Amber,” Frog In Boiling Water’s dark and dreamily anthemic opening track that does what the band’s best songs do: meld Smith’s relentlessly airy pipes with deceptively heavy axework. From there, the periodic return of the cult-y low-fi videos got more and more intriguing, and more reflective of DIIV’s vision of evil forces trying to bury their teeth in society’s collective neck. The band’s own interpretation of what the old “frog in boiling water” metaphor means gives you a sense of how the onscreen action, and the story it told, unfolded; as the band put it, “a slow, sick, and overwhelmingly banal collapse of society under end-stage capitalism, the brutal realities we’ve maybe come to accept as normal. That’s the boiling water and we are the frogs.”

Eventually, Exxon Mobil got roped into the video action as one of the overlords pushing the populace into enduring subservience toward capitalism, along with “Soul-Net,” the title of one of the album’s cuts and, as presented in the video, some kind of cultish online operation. (The song “Soul-Net” is billed in the band’s press materials as “a prime canvas for Smith’s character study about those who have found meaning for a vacuous life through online conspiracy theories.”) The climax of this little show-within-show was just before the encore, as Smith himself appeared in an Exxon Mobil/Soul-Net endorsement video, sounding for all the world like he was brainwashed. When the band emerged right after that for its encore, the live, in-the-flesh Smith asked the audience, “What the fuck was that?”

As for Smith (top photo) and his bandmates, they were sublime throughout the night, punching through Frog In Boiling Water’s best (the aforementioned tracks, the title track, “Raining On Your Pillow”) and the band’s hookiest and best known guitar rockers from previous albums, with the guitar-break earworms of “Under the Sun” and “Blankenship” eliciting the pep and bounce they should. Smith, an unassuming presence on stage right, is often in his own world, bent over his guitar at the waist, angled back toward the amps at a 45-degree angle, lost in the swirl of the rock ‘n’ roll atmosphere he’s creating. At center stage, guitarist Andrew Bailey was a pogo-ing, energetic counterbalance to Smith, acting as DIIV’s most fervent link with the crowd in front of them.

DIIV deserves props for this sardonic, substantial audiovisual display that added another dimension to what you normally see at the likes of Emo’s. If there are any notes, it would be the omission of a couple key songs, perhaps most notably the extremely well-written chronicle of Smith’s addiction struggles, “Skin Game.” Next time, I hope.

Openers: They Are Gutting a Body of Water (TAGABOW), untitled (halo)

Semi-famously, if you’re a political junkie, George W. Bush is said to have reacted to Donald Trump’s 2017 “American carnage” presidential inauguration speech by rendering a pithy verdict: “That was some weird shit.”

And that was what came to mind as I tried to make sense of TAGABOW, a Philadelphia heavy shoegaze band with, well, let’s call it a highly offbeat approach to rock performance. We’ll start with main man Douglas Dulgarian, whom I Googled to make sure he doesn’t have some sort of publicized stage-fright problem, or some other sort of condition that makes it difficult for him to face a crowd. This I felt compelled to research because Dulgarian — clad in a spiked guitar strap that made him all stegosaurus-ish — literally didn’t face the crowd. His mic pointed toward his audience, Dulgarian turned his back on them and faced drummer Ben Opatut — for basically the entire show.

That was just the beginning, though, as Dulgarian spent the first five minutes of TAGABOW’s precious time coaxing noisy programming from his sampling console as the rest of the quartet just watched him do this. Then they collectively launched into a live song. Then back to watching Dulgarian on his sampler, which spat out some club/dance-type stuff. Then another darkly alternative band performance. And so this back-and-forth went on for awhile, with a sample at one point of what sounded like the classic ’90s dialup noise in the midst of more clubby programming. This was, well, weird shit, and not in a good way, as the programmed interludes — and Dulgarian’s permanent about-face — dampened and short-circuited any momentum TAGABOW’s dark roar generated.

The first opener, Los Angeles’ untitled (halo), at least didn’t do any of that. They stuck to a conventional opening set that gave an enjoyable sampler of their murky (and yes, gaze-y) alt-rock. Lead singer/guitarist Ariana Mamnoon has the weary voice that fits the genre, and though their stage presence was a tad too disengaged toward the very end of the half-hour set, songs like the dark and lurching “intrusive” made an impression.

Check out photos of all three acts below.

DIIV