Rating:

(Kemado, 2006) Okay, yeah. Lansing-Dreiden is an anonymous art collective that doesn’t just make music, they sculpt, write, paint, and do anything else that can be construed as art. That’s been beaten to the death all over the internet in discussion about the band and their latest record, The Dividing Island. But does that really have anything to do with whether or not it’s actually a good album? Of course not! On that front, all that really matters is what emanates from the speakers while the disc is spinning, and that turns out to be quite impressive. What’s impressive about it is the way that Lansing-Dreiden has managed to take influence from so many sources and still make a cohesive, moody, downright excellent record.

The first three minutes of “Dividing Island” actually sound like an island, complete with tribal drums and instrumentation that sounds like animal noises. The strings, synths, drums and mellow vocals continue until just over halfway through the song, when all of a sudden…it’s The Who! Chiming rock guitars, anthemic vocals, thundering drums, it’s all there without warning, but it works remarkably well. Following that is the very new wavey “Cement to Stone,” which should sound instantly familiar to anyone who lived through the 1980s. But Lansing-Dreiden’s version of new wave is very dissimilar to the current revival, which merely takes cues from the original thing and maps it out onto modern rock. On songs like “Cement to Stone,” “Two Extremes,” and “Our Next Breath” the band takes the fluffy pop of bands like Talk Talk, Culture Club, and A-Ha and twists it around. It still sounds the same, but it’s somehow eerier, more sinister. Elsewhere, the band takes influence from The Human League, Depeche Mode (”Our Hour” could have Dave Gahan on vocals, for all I know), and Manheim Steamroller. Yes, that Manheim Steamroller. Listen to “A Line You Can Cross,” then Manheim’s version of “Carol of the Bells,” and then try saying there’s no similarity. “One For All” finds the band using a seventies soft rock and soul crib sheet, but not forgetting to make it as spacey and trippy as the rest of the album. “Parts of the Promise,” an upbeat semi-post-punk number with pulsating bass, video game synths, and Television guitars, may be the album’s best song. “Symbol of Symmetry,” the next to last track, is a kind of “calm before the storm” moment, an instrumental with picked guitars, a few strings, and a vaguely malevolent aire. The storm is most certainly after the calm, as “Dethroning the Optimyth” blasts through the speakers with all the evil sound of gothic metal. The drums pound, the synthesizers and guitars howl, the bass rumbles like the end of the world has come, and then … it’s the soundtrack to The Breakfast Club, if only for a few seconds. But then the two merge into one synth pop metal beast, a creature fit to inhabit hell. The final track of The Diving Island is as epic as epic gets, but somehow still fits the twisted new wave aesthetic of the record. It’s brilliant.

Throughout The Dividing Island, Lansing-Dreiden pulls off so many different strains of new wave that it starts looking like penicillin will do no good - the new wave record on this record can’t be killed with conventional drugs! The band incorporates the fluffy commercial pop of the 80s, the serious art-rock new wave, gothic metal, Pink Floyd, The Who, The Beatles, 60s psychedelia, even new age music. But somehow, they make it all sound perfectly natural together, and in doing so have created a hell of a fun, if very odd, record.

  1. Dividing Island

* 2. Cement to Stone

* 3. Line You Can Cross

  4. One for All

  5. Two Extremes

* 6. Part of the Promise

  7. Our Next Breath

  8. Our Hour

  9. Symbol of Symmetry

*10. Dethroning the Optimyth

* = recommended tracks

Buy album

– Kevin

This 4-beetsreview was posted on May 26th, 2006. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.