Review by Sonny for Divide and Dissolve - Gas Lit (2021)

Drone metal, despite having a reputation for monotony and repetition can actually throw up some very interesting releases and, for me, Divide and Dissolve's Gas Lit is one of them. Now, Divide and Dissolve are new to me, despite releasing three albums since 2016. They are a duo comprising Australian Sylvie Nehill on drums and US-born Takiaya Reed on guitar and saxophone and are based in Melbourne. Their music is mainly instrumental and their themes are based around anti-opression, societal equality and the end of imperialism.

Their take on drone metal includes a reasonable amount of doom metal too, but also incorporates instruments more usually associated with classical or jazz music for a seemingly quite avant-garde experience, despite not indulging in the angular and disjointed mechanics of avant-garde music, but letting the disparate sounds flow one into the other in an organic and oddly satisfying way. One moment the horn sound is allowing for a dreamy, meditative sensation and then the massively distorted guitar and fairly primitive-sounding drum patterns gatecrash in with an angry battery of crushingly heavy chords that blow away any sense of peace or calm that may have been accumulated, only themselves to be replaced once more by the serene blowing of horns, as if to say "even this too must pass".

There are songs like Prove it and especially It's Really Complicated that are full-on, earthquake-like rumblings of sonic mayhem and I did enjoy them, but it is the songs that make most use of the dichotomy between light and dark, calm and anarchy that I found most interesting. There is also a track called Did You Have Something to Do with It that is basically just a spoken word recital with only a minimal instrumental backing, invoking the spirit of popular uprising against oppression and performed by painter Minori Sanchiz-Fung.

I know this album probably sounds a million miles away from what a large number of people get into metal for and may be dismissed by some as politically-correct, liberal-artsy bullshit but if you have a taste for the more unusual metal releases or want to try to get into drone then this, especially with it clocking in at a mere 33 minutes, may well be a decent place to start.