CD review: Division Day "Beartrap Island"

Music saved my life. What so many espouse in hopes that it'll accurately portray their all-encompassing obsession to outsiders. There's no need to be so dramatic, kids. We get it. (Note: I'm still waiting to hear someone profess "music killed me.") But the oft-exaggerated statement can have a ring of truth. Some bands craft albums so complete, so aurally comforting in moments of turmoil that it seems as if their songs really do "save" lives and restore optimism in a mind once clouded by self-destructive rumination. The four guys in L.A.'s Division Day produced such a work with the debut full-length "Beartrap Island," comparable to arguably the most "lifesaving" record in the indie rock realm: Neutral Milk Hotel's 1997 masterpiece "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea." "Beartrap Island" wields the same tactics as the '90s classic to hit all of a listener's sweet emotional spots: diverse song structures and sounds that create a dynamic experience; dark themes - fear, isolation, death - easily relatable and cathartic during fits of depression; unexpectedly sinister and abstractly poetic lyrics. And like Jeff Mangum, Division Day's endearingly off-kilter, front-and-center vocalist pulls off lyrics like "I want your blood inside my head" as, oddly, innocent. With all of the blood, blackouts, drowning and wrecks, the only thing masking the record's pervasive carnage is its pop sensibility. The band relies more on rock rather than Mangum's folk underpinnings, but they also tap into a range of genres: manic Nirvana-punk in a feedback-heavy "Ricky"; indie pop purity in "Catch Your Death"; "Reversible," a shadowy melody so rain-soaked it could have been on the Cure's opus "Disintegration"; and touches of My Bloody Valentine shoegaze dissonance in "To the Woods." The album droops only with the dubby "Hand to the Sound" and bland "Colorguard," which carry repetitive choruses past their expiration date. "Beartrap Island" forges a complete experience by using the title track opener's perverted church organ melody, cloaked in a drape of Sigur Ros guitar noise, on closer "Is it True What They Say?" A death has transpired, but reincarnation is still possible: "Is it true what they say?/that our shadows won't stay/up on high, but will fall/tumble back into the squall/and then hickup and spin/and be born all again." Division Day is a band that feels our pain, and sometimes that's all we need to hear. Check out Division Day's "Tigers" video: