Divide And Dissolve: Gas Lit | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- Divide And Dissolve, both musically and politically, are one of the most uncompromising bands you’ll come across. Their song titles, such as “black vengeance” or “cultural extermination” are like rallying cries or accusations. The music itself is largely free of lyrical content: the messages delivered in surges of mood as the crushing power of doom metal guitar erupts, before a haunting lick of soprano sax soothes, only momentarily, before the fury roars back.

Takiaya Reed and Sylvie Nehill (why are duos always the loudest?) go some way to filling in the lyrical blanks in their largely instrumental music, explaining their political beliefs at length in interviews and holding Q&As at their gigs. There’s another place to look if you want to know what Divide And Dissolve are thinking and that’s the spoken-word poetry of Minori Sanchez-Fung. In each of the band’s three albums you’ll find one song presided over by Sanchez-Fung’s sepulchral, deadpan voice, delivering a screed that cuts to the heart of the record.

On BASIC, an album dedicated to a meditation on blackness, it provided a satirical postscript deriding the absurd nature of discrimination and criminalisation of the other. On ABOMINATION, which raged over the struggle over race and culture, she built a picture of the English language as, variously, a weapon, a prison and some kind of mind-bending ruin, full of shadows and monsters, lying in wait for those trying to navigate it.

For their latest, Gas Lit, Reed & Nehill take on the recently popularised idea of abuse as a mind game, where the victim is made to think that their pain and suffering is really a hallucination, a symptom of their own insanity. It’s a framework which has been applied to many contemporary examples in, for instance, the #MeToo movement, racial injustice, late capitalism, or really anywhere there’s a power imbalance which those who have the power try to portray as the normal state of affairs, even as they label the bereft as ungrateful, thieving or mad.

In the album notes Divide And Dissolve narrow the focus, pointing the finger at racial inequality but Sanchez-Fung’s accusation is, unless I’ve misunderstood it, more all-encompassing; hope that's not controversial. Did You Have Something To Do With It? looks back to the dawn of the human race and the greed which was our birthright. It’s a taint that is so fundamental it works its way, insidiously, into everything we are:

Releasing a suffering recorded in /Stone / And in bone/ So old that language can’t console it / This was the blow which we struck / At first without knowing how deep it would grow./ It would grow / Into a frightening history that fractures hope / First, by attacking the body / And then, by distorting the mind.

It’s a truly epic, if not altogether unreasonable j’accuse. If it stuns you into immobility, don’t worry, Sanchez-Fung isn’t all doom and gloom, proffering some hope for the future: “Don’t forget, this too, this too, is our time / Our spirit is not weaker, it is waiting on us to decide / What it is, that we will honour while we are alive.”

Well, so much for the politics! Musically, Gas Lit is the most cohesively realised of Divide And Dissolve’s records. The juxtaposition of gentle sax and explosive guitar (both performed by Takiaya) has been one of the band’s most effective stylistic conceits and here the contrast writhes through much more of the music, to great effect. Many people have described this record as ‘ugly’ music, which I have to say I just don’t understand. I love the warm roar of the doom and the sax-led passages are like a threnody, a song of loss, melancholy and beautiful. It has also been widely noted that Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s Ruban Neilson produced Gas Lit and, for sure, his presence is palpable. The compression brings together the disparate elements of Divide And Dissolve's sound much more effectively and you’ll also notice a lot of those experimental production-scape touches -familiar from UMO- appear here and contribute a very different sound from track to track. Finally, the astute tracking makes this work neatly as a record: the bipolar moods of sadness and rage whip back and forth, traversed by winding paths of unease; it’s a compelling journey from end to end.

Gas Lit rages and grieves because, even as this record comes together powerfully and effectively, the mission goes on. Takiaya and Sylvie point to a raw wound in the world that continues to bleed without abatement. It’s hard to tie up a review like this because it always feels like something is left undone. There’s work to do and If I can say anything about it, I hope the will to get it done is as strong as the music.

- Chris Cobcroft.
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