DIIV rolls out the A and the V at Royale on Monday, 5 August 2024.

Horse Jumper of Love and Full Body 2 gaze shoes in the opening slots.

The Jamaica Plain Music Festival is coming!

Also known as the JP Music Fest. That’s got more zing.

This year’s edition is coming your way September 7, and each edition is organized with tender love and care by a neighborhood community that loves live music and knows how to have a good time. This is a bottom-up affair, by and for the people, and it needs your support.

If you missed the annual Smell The Love fundraiser, you can still donate below!

If you missed the fundraiser show in March at the American Legion Hall with Rick Berlin, Colonel Broccoli and the Legion Basement Band, and Fantastic Trees, you can still donate below!

If you missed the annual classic fundraiser John Casey’s JP Bar Wars at Midway Cafe, you can still donate below!

Do your part to keep Jamaica Plain fresh AND funky.

Philadelphia’s Full Body 2 hopped aboard the Boston bill at Royale for DIIV’s US tour. A shoegazey three-piece big on guitar texture, which shares time with buffed-up percussion for the biggest spotlight.

What are we talking about with the percussion? A drum set that combines good old-fashioned skin bashing along with the digital pads of drum samples. The combined effect was a futuristic beat with throwback guff.

It was the punchy punctuation needed to save the washed out chords from floating too far high into the atmosphere. You know, like when a helium balloon floats off into the sky, up, up, up, and you never see it again.

Some lighting tech difficulties at the outset delayed the start. Who needs it? Full Body 2 rocked just fine without it. The advice you give to your little niece before she stars in the school play is the best advice here: “If something goes wrong, just keep going, no one in the crowd will notice.”

Locals Horse Jumper of Love plays slow. Not like *ridiculously* slow, but just slow enough that the mood and texture of the four-piece is allowed to seep into your brain, take up residence, hatch little baby aliens, etc. Speed up HJOL tracks by about 30% or so and does that sound like pop punk or what?

The band has a new album dropping on August 16, titled Disaster Trick via Run For Cover Records (whose unbalanced owner told me to “hang it up” a while back). Check it out – RFC Records all up in there.

Shout out to the guy in the crowd who, immediately after the band said they were from Boston, hollered at them: “Do you like the Celtics?!” Sure, yes, of course, why not.

Shout out to other horses like Horse Lords and Horsegirl.

Extra points for the bassist who kind of looks like the drummer from Cape Crush. Maybe it’s just the mustache.

You pronounce DIIV as “dive” because the band was formerly known as Dive. Makes sense.

The shoegazey band headlined the shoegazey bill on a massive US tour in support of their latest album Frog In Boiling Water. Which was released on vinyl in partnership with Good Neighbor to produce “not-toxic” records. Still not edible.

Some bands just get up on stage and lean into their wall of sound for 60+ minutes. DIIV, on their other hand, has a premeditated audio-visual attack, starting with the introductory clip, projected on the two- or three-story film screen behind the band, of a close-cropped shot of a showered & scrubbed refugee from a utopian sci-fi flick delivering a spacey monologue about how the show you’re about to hear is going to open your fucking mind and cram a ham sandwich full of enlightenment into your skull. Or something to that effect.

The video clips are played half for drama (if you’re on real drugs, you might actually take it seriously), half for laughs (especially when one of the space age charlatans pitches hard on the merch table). Whatever it is, it’s a nice palate cleanser between songs, and gives the band a chance to grab a drink of water.

One more comment on the visuals. The screen behind the stage is augmented by smaller video monitors wrapped around the lip of the balcony, flanking the generous SRO orchestra space. The small monitors showed simplified versions of the clips played on the big screen. Has any act figured out exactly what to do with these extra little monitors? Oneohtrix Point Never used the same strategy as DIIV when he played Royale last April, employing the auxiliary video monitors to just overload the senses to the nth degree.

Extra points for a face-to-the-floor guitar grind that waxed experimental while still maintaining the pop through line.

Shout out to the band for closed-captioning the video scrolls – why don’t more bands do this?

The US tour wrapped in the band’s native Brooklyn, giving the band barely a breather before they hop back on the merry-go-round for a string of September dates in South America and Mexico. Viva la DIIVA!

OK, the pun doesn’t work if you pronounce it “dive” but maybe a good reason not to pronounce it “dive”?

Photo Gallery