- Heavy music is a genre that produces quite a lot of extremity, including extreme opinions and, well, some extreme bullshit. Melbourne-based Divide And Dissolve like their heavy music and are all about extremity, but theirs is a bit different from many other purveyors of chugging guitar noise and they're not very likely to put up with any crap, extreme or otherwise, from anyone.
In the vein of super-heavy hippies like Napalm Death or Wolves In The Throne Room, the duo of Takaiya Reed and Sylvie Nehill are, if anything, even more uncompromising in the political message they charge their music with. Song titles like Black Supremacy and Cultural Extermination are, to put it mildly, provocative, especially in the world of heavy music.
In a sense, Divide And Dissolve need to brand their songs with such great vigour because, as a largely instrumental band, it’s tough to get their message across any other way. The doom-ish riffs, recalling the likes of Sunn O))), do make those titles glow with a burning intensity. It’s kind of embarrassing to say, but hearing this sound come from this band really does feel subversive: how many other doom bands do you know that are wholly composed of people who are not white men? This, obviously, doesn’t sound like Bodycount, Skunk Anansie, Skindred or Living Colour either: it doesn’t sound like the black version of heavy music. It’s like Takaiya and Sylvie stuck a big finger in the faces of the genre’s gatekeepers and started playing the whitest damn metal sound they could find. Unsurprisingly the pair cop a fair bit of resistance. Their social media is often lit up with enough hate for a klan rally, apparently, I can only tell you second-hand. Whatever you think of my commitment to journalistic integrity, I am absolutely not visiting the Facebook comments to find out.
Despite the abuse, or perhaps because of it, Divide And Dissolve work at what they do with a frightening level of gusto. Two albums and a US tour in two years? Not a problem. 2017’s BASIC, excited a lot of interest with its crushing guitars, licks of haunting soprano sax and unflinching message. The album liner notes are a manifesto: “...this music is designed to divide and dissolve white supremacy, to discredit the basic lifestyle that many appear to be committed to. When you are basic you cannot admit that slavery still exists…” That’s a small taste.
On the strength of that, I didn’t expect their new album, the even more forcefully titled Abomination, to be quieter than its predecessor, but it is. The opening and title-track just doesn’t hit with as much force. It’s more like an arty-alt-rock and I really wish I could offer some other band to compare it to: like Dirty Three with the violin removed? I dunno, maybe it is an original. Whatever else it is, it isn’t a problem: the all-crushing thunder of doom might have been dialed back, but in its place we get more space, a haunting sparseness, a different but equally evocative feel.
Speaking of haunting, songs like Assimilation and Resistance again feature Takaiya’s ghostly soprano sax. These have many of the same hallmarks as the equally transfixing Black Power, from the previous album. It reminds me a bit of Colin Stetson’s stuff, especially now that he’s moving explicitly into heavy music, although I don’t think he ever plays soprano. At any rate, anything this unnervingly impressive is worth doing again.
I get the feeling that Divide And Dissolve are the sort of folks who wouldn’t think twice about putting performance poetry into their music. Minori Sanchiz-Fung reprises her spoken-word appearance on Basic. This time around she’s riffing on the hidden qualities of language and the way it interacts with ethnicity. Sound heavy-going? It is, but there’s a glorious tension at work as she explains about what it’s like to interact with English as though she had stumbled on a hideous conspiracy pervading a hallowed institution. “You live forever within it, and through its walls you see everything beyond.”
I don’t suppose you have to be a died-in-the-wool racist to be put off by a commitment to social justice as intense as that of Divide And Dissolve. Putting it in the medium of music is equally divisive. I’ll further guess that the small audience for doom in general will be whittled down mercilessly by all the different things that Divide And Dissolve are. For me though, Abomination is anything but: it’s a finely nuanced record and that’s a rare thing in doom. If it demands that you stand up and be counted, unlike a lot of political movements, it gives you a lot in return, as soon as you get on board.
- Chris Cobcroft.