Volver al pasado a veces trae melancolĂa, me invade de nostalgia y me saca una dulce sonrisa de resignaciĂłn.
ÂżFue lo mejor?
Si, definitivamente. Tomaste tu decisiĂłn, yo la mĂa y sabemos que de hoy en adelante, toda va a ser para que seamos felices y mejores personas.
Lamentarlo no sirve de nada, reprochar, menos. Solo queda continuar y esperar de la vida lo mejor para ambos.
Leregi Renga
Divide and Dissolve continues to provoke, even if some of the questions are becoming a bit familiar: Can instrumental music express a politics? Is there anything intrinsically subversive in the fact of women of color making heavy music? Is doom metal the right (sub)cultural space for indigenous-identified women wishing to promulgate a socially conscious, anti-colonial agenda? Systemic doesnât provide any evidence or assertions that will settle those issues, even as the bandâs public-facing discourse and promotional chatter strike ever more righteous rhetorical stances. This reviewer is down for the politics. The music is a more complicated proposition.
Doom metal is conventionally possessed of feeling tones that seem suited to Divide and Dissolveâs project: misery on tectonic scales, anger that smolders and simmers and then erupts into sudden conflagration. Other bands have coupled that tonal range with left-leaning socio-political messaging; for recent examples, see Forlesenâs ecologically minded folky doom, or Mordomâs application of glacially paced bum-out music to the problematics of dope addiction. Even more relevant are many of the records released by the Body over the last fifteen years â see especially No One Deserves Happiness (2016) or many of the cover songs compiled on Anthology (2011). Somehow the political content of the Bodyâs music is both more and less didactic than what Divide and Dissolve has succeeded in articulating, and certainly itâs a lot more compelling, aesthetically and ideologically.Â
Thatâs not so damning a criticism, given the Bodyâs excellence, which is tough for any band to compete with. But itâs worth noting. Divide and Dissolve gets most didactic on Systemic with âKingdom of Fear,â which includes a spoken word performance from poet Minori Sanchez-Fung. Over the bandâs cool drone and occasional stirs of noise that evoke Earthâs more recent work, Sanchez-Fung intones, âIn the kingdom of fear, a shadow hovers over my cover of leaves and violets,â and later, âI have pleaded to consult the chorus of night, to hold the strands of moon that tether me to beauty and let me rest.â The language isnât straightforward enough to stir politicized passions, and while the images sustain a reading that underscores womenâs productive powers, they collapse into an earth-mother symbolics that feels dated and a little soft, when a more militant response seems necessary to confront the injustices attending our current conjuncture.Â
The record is better when the music does the talking, as it usually does for Divide and Dissolve. âIndignationâ commences with a couple minutes of woodwinds, interlaced and gesturing toward symphonic textures, performed by Takiaya Reed. The inevitable, deafening entrance of Reedâs guitar sounds simultaneously like explosion and collapse, which is not easily done, and which is a fitting sonic complement to indignation: the emotion moves toward the world with aggressive rage, and also back into the person feeling indignant, who insists on the overriding validity of her feeling, her ideas, her sense of fairness. Thatâs the sort of interest that Divide and Dissolve is capable of generating.Â
Of course, none of that relative complexity controls what a listener might tend to feel indignant about. Tune into the various permanently outraged talking heads on The Daily Wire, for instance, and youâll hear a whole lot of indignation: Matt Walshâs moronic (and always creepy) reactionary chatter about the status of the noun âwoman,â or Candace Owensâ latest bit of semi-coherent clickbait (this reviewer was particularly grossed out by her defense of the cause of the American Confederacy on putative social class terms). Perhaps doom metal would not be the first choice to soundtrack those bits of rightwing bilge â but I can hear Moonsorrowâs insipid, Viking-obsessed, musical muscle-flexing whenever Walsh or Josh Hawley start yip-yapping about masculinity.Â
But thatâs me. Musicâs nonrepresentational access to feeling may be its most distinct and its most powerful aesthetic property. In that aforementioned promotional chatter, much is made of Divide and Dissolveâs investment in the unifying power of non-verbal communication, and the undervalued extent of that non-verbal communicationâs presence in our lives and experiences. But the non-verbal is still socially constructed and patently representational. See the recent transformation of the thumb-to-forefinger âOKâ sign into an emblem for white power, which occurred through the functionality of social media-driven symbolics. Divide and Dissolve make heavy music, and these are indeed heavy times. To intervene effectively, the heaviness may need the iterative and representational power of the verbal. And when itâs invoked, that language may need to be political, focused and forceful.Â
