Fabricating a sense of Captured Tracks love-in – the estimable Brooklyn label to which Smith is currently signed – Mac DeMarco's Freaking Out The Neighbourhood thumps over the PA, its every giddy guitar lick slithering with the triumphant aplomb of a home run. He ain't here, but Big Mac swings by those cruddy Dalston parts aforesaid come Monday. Phew. You should go.
It's then onto the gloriously, and with it unapologetically impenetrable Casiotone drone of Egyptian Hip Hop's Aldous R.H. His set is a quietly subversive statement of intent, and ends with one intended as a reticent, if swiftly revoked sorry. No apology necessary. Parakeet, on the other hand, have a few forebears to thank as their brash amalgam appears equal parts dull, sludgy '90s stadium echo and '00s blog bleurgh. Yucky as E8.
But it's not of these that every tongue eagerly wags tonight – conversely, they're tied in knots over another. "This is history in the making", a perhaps overzealous type buoyantly chirps having picked up a ticket. There's also a fair bit of disquieting chatter of depraved sexual deviancy, so at this juncture we'll skip on from a transcript of all dropped eaves we managed to pick up on over the couple hours spent sweating out in an ever sweltering Garage.
Though this is an ambience that ignites in every feasible respect, even from soundcheck. Smith's first out and last in – a scrupulous perfectionist spooning out slimy globules of psych puked up from a Fender Deluxe Reverb. He knew how he wanted Oshin to sound long before the process had even begun to near completion, and by Gawd does he know how he wants, or maybe even needs tonight to sound. His every flick of AAA-banded wrist is met with much barnyard hooting – it's an atmosphere that's more American than most Americana. "Cannah grab summa yo beer, buddy?" slurs a someone slathered in authentic MLB Franchise apparel.
It's a look that doesn't sit particularly neatly alongside Smith – he's (at least initially) a more introspective type. He's personable enough from the moment we meet earlier on in the evening, although it takes time to crack the initially unapproachable shell the estranged Beach Fossil has been lugging the longitudes and latitudes of this planet of late. Amid an immediate flurry of overexcitement offstage and a spate of puerility emanating from it, and isolated wide out stage-right, he cuts a lone, almost insular figure.
"Hi. We're called DIIV, and this is the first song off our record."
Given the sporadically nebulous nature of said record – his majestic début full-length, Oshin – it's an acute introduction. There's no pussyfooting about the place; no superfluous witter nor inanity. Time is of the essence, and the time they've allocated themselves is but brief to begin with. From the feathery dip of this bespoke opener, (Druun), the show runs more or less nonstop, meaning it clocks in around 40, inclusive of encore. Is it all too short? It's sharper than a cutting-edged blade gilded with the most carmine of red bloods for sure, and similarly it's an indubitably full-blooded rampage through the record. But they move with such pace that it's at times all too much to take in at once: the insistent lulling of an astonishingly scintillating How Long Have You Known; the pinprick staccato of Past Lives; the humid claustrophobia Sometime conjures.
It's breakneck through to the sweetened, and by now heavily sweated final stab of Follow, and whilst it's therefore of little wonder they're in and out in well under an hour it's a show that comes interwoven with oodles of wonderment. Smith is only fleetingly seen, drenched in artificial twilight, through a dense thick of guitar neck wood. Though accelerated as it is – an incidental development in the live show and sound, so Cole earlier avows – the tenderness daubed across Oshin is diluted a tad, with the aesthetic pertaining almost to the archetypal punk show. Its speed unbridled, it's as though out of control. The result is wild, and with that wildly reinvigorating thus it's of little perplexity that an aptly full-blooded, and subsequently bloody-nosed brawl erupts midway through Doused.
Subjectively, it's the sort of song to provoke reverence, rather than this undue violence that it duly prompts as it tugs tenaciously on that particular streak. However it is, as Smith himself is only too aware, the "outlier"; the terrestrial mammal dumped in the unfathomable deep of the Oshin. This is a record which breeds mystique, though Doused seethes with something altogether unknown. It's neither anger, nor vitriol, but it's my song of the year – a critter charged with a malevolent raison d'être that squirms beneath the skin and lays its reverb-fertilised eggs. Once contextualised live, they hatch. All heck breaks loose: a few get "fucked up" and floored, pints spray, and springs once spry boing right outta toon.
And it's here that Smith comes into his own: he cuts and thrusts wildly throughout, rolling back and forth on his pixie green plimsoles though he now becomes a model of compulsion, caught in the song's fierce undertow. And so just as the control he may have over that which he has seeped out into the world with Oshin is in a constant state of decline, so too the live show is becoming something that's almost uncontainable in its thoroughly unruly boisterousness. Introspective or extroverted; out of it or into it, it's becoming increasingly impossible to resist the volatile tides of DIIV.
