When considering any one facet of Lansing-Dreiden's ongoing multimedia project, it's easy to slide toward reviewing the whole conceptual apparatus that surrounds it. The New York-based collective works in music, visual art, installation, and print, all from behind a smokescreen of anonymity. The art is often formidable, but the theoretical apparatus that surrounds it fluctuates between vague and incoherent. Their nebulous manifestoes are often devoid of actual content, and their anonymity seems to mask an essential lack of things to say. What's the difference between building a cult of personality around an abstraction and an individual? And is media manipulation a valid artistic pursuit, or is it simply art's acquiescence to commerce?
These questions would be worth considering if they had anything to do with The Dividing Island. Given the group's anonymity and the album's museum-quality-- it has the air of an artifact carefully constructed and hermetically sealed under glass-- The Dividing Island seems to float in a void. Thematically, it's blurry, less exploring the nature of division than warily poking at it, careful not to say too much. But the record's hermetic quality founders against one piece of Lansing-Dreiden groupthink, which is surprisingly useful in parsing this album: "Lansing-Dreiden is a company that sees no distinction between art and commerce" (from the group's official website).
Sound familiar? It's a clue, albeit an unintentional one, toward the nature of The Dividing Island. As Jess Harvell rightly noted in his Pitchfork article "Now That's What I Call New Pop!", in the early 1980s some members of the British post-punk scene combined their adventurous DIY spirit with a newfound commercial ambition. It was glamorous and progressive, synth-heavy and wildly eclectic, integrating diverse non-rock strands into sumptuously produced electro-orchestral pop. It's this cultural moment-- the moment of ABC and the Human League, of cavernously echoing drums and cerebral keys-- that Lansing-Dreiden inhabit here.
"A Line You Can Cross" dips into nighttime neon new-wave, replete with spitting drums, Caucasoid-funk breakdowns, vocodered refrains, and minutely orchestrated electro-kitsch. "Part of the Promise" tries on at least four different guitar effects within its first 10 seconds before collapsing into a sleek, rumbling locomotive covered in diverse graffiti-- "Bombs Over Baghdad" meets Depeche Mode. The smoky, liquored "One for All" channels mellow soul in its abstracted way, quiet thunder sounds and all. But the band is at its best on ephemeral tracks like "Two Extremes"-- a heartbeat and a watery drone, a helix of chiming synths, with restful, floating vocals. You can see the theme of division play out over the song titles, but the only operative division this record explores, tacitly, is between the band's theory and their praxis. This disconnect is troubling, but The Dividing Island is sealed off enough from it-- from everything except the idiom it reconstructs-- that it doesn't effect the album's success on musical terms.
