Blue Boredom

"Blue Boredom" is the most open and strange entry in DIIV's catalog precisely because it hands the mic to an outside voice — Avey Tare of Animal Collective — and the friction between his more expressive, melodically unpredictable delivery and DIIV's characteristic blankness creates something genuinely odd. The instrumental bed is classic DIIV: arpeggiated guitar lines looping over themselves, a soft persistent rhythm, everything coated in reverb until individual elements lose their edges. But Avey Tare sings with a queasy, slightly dissonant affect that refuses to settle into the comfort the music seems to offer, his voice curling around phrases in ways that feel almost alien against the backdrop. The result is a track that is simultaneously soothing and slightly wrong, like finding something beautiful but not quite being able to trust it. The lyrical register is ennui elevated to an aesthetic — boredom not as emptiness but as a specific quality of perception, the blue of the title functioning as both color and mood. Within the context of Oshin, this track stands apart, functioning almost as an interlude from a stranger, more psychedelic universe bleeding into DIIV's carefully maintained atmosphere. It's the kind of song you stumble on at the end of an album and return to disproportionately, its particular combination of familiarity and unease difficult to explain or replicate.