Divide and Dissolve - Insatiable

A Closer Listen

As the system’s parts plug into each other to grind our senses into shapes unrecognizable to ourselves, we are produced and reproduced to mimic its never-ending impulses. Doom metal has always been about the world’s end, the concrete burden of unraveling ourselves unto the slow tragedy of building nothingness. The weight of its volume is undeniable, and yet in this generalized oppression there is always a glimmer of reconstitution of the self, our tears and our rage a catalyst for creative destruction: for our inner life to truly begin, we must bring reality itself to a close. Insatiable refers to that colonial logic of reproduction, the properties of our desires defined by a desire for property and its ultimate consumption, the grand movement into nothingness. Yet Divide and Dissolve focuses upon that glimmer, slightly and subtly twisting the usual patterns of doom into less of an oppressive certainty, and more into a kind of clarity, an ephemeral moment of reflection – it introduces the present into a genre obsessed with the future.

The most interesting dynamic in the album is that it seems to be produced like a soundscape. It turns black and Cherokee guitarist Takiaya Reed’s riffs into a textural space, a weave that includes saxophone and voice distortions, following not a narrative but the configuration of an emotional site. If doom’s mystical proclivities emerge from a prophetic relation to time, Insatiable less magically locates the end in the past; for the native peoples of the American continent, after all, that apocalypse occurred five centuries ago, and we are still living in its wake. The title tracks themselves suggest no supernatural qualities: “Hegemonic”, “Monolithic”, “Withholding”, “Loneliness”… are all representatives of the logic of an actual power, not from beyond, but enforced here and now. Contemporaneity needs not a purely linear guide with a singularity as conclusion, because it is an aggregation of vectors in an infinite escape towards potential. It is another kind of power, the one that makes soundscapes continually leak signification, make and remake connections anew, its spatiality free from propertied definition. Each track is conceptually burdened by capital’s power, but each also finds that glimmer in the vastness of noisy, repetitive riffs and meditative sax drones. I only wish the weave was better integrated, since the instrumentation is often neatly separate, but it is nevertheless a strong dynamic that does not simply develop into drone metal.

Whereas drone offers an exploration of a moment, Insatiable still follows a structure that is only suggestive of multiplicity, the crackling feedback of each riff a spatial nodal point from which a narrative might emerge. This in-between drone and doom is one of the album’s strengths, because it serves that pull and tear of self-oblivion and self-reconstruction well, of singing death’s praises not for the sole sake of death, but for the sake of fiery recombinations of existence. In Divide and Dissolve’s formulation, doom is not about fate or destiny, the tragic victory of the real – it is rather a Greek comedy in which the fire of individual freedom burns towards new societies. A place, a story, and the potential to bring this world to an end: a drone, a riff, a soundscape of heavy, deep cuts in the workings of a seemingly unbeatable system. To be sated will not happen one far-off day – if it is to be, it must happen now, within the amorphous grasp of the present. (David Murrieta Flores)