Division Day seizes the day with ‘Visitation’

Kevin Bronson on
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Caught between rock and a hard place, Division Day chose rock. Obsidian, if I had to choose a particular stone.

“Visitation,” the album that announces the return of the Los Angeles quartet from a year-plus period of travails and self-doubt, is dark, dense and polished. It’s so intense and claustrophobic that you’d think the guys locked themselves in a room, put their noses to their instruments and didn’t emerge until they had a record done. Which would have been plausible, considering how in the past five years Division Day has been up and down, signed and unsigned, riding the wave and dead in the water. Its sexiest moment might have been being name-checked on “90210,” for what that’s worth.

But the new album (out today on Dangerbird) largely took shape in a sort of independent study, outlined via e-mail by four guys – singer/keyboardist Rohner Segnitz, guitarist Ryan Wilson, bassist Seb Bailey and drummer Kevin Lenhart – who were committed to making an artistic statement but, says Lenhart, “were burned out from being in the practice space rehearsing the same stuff.”

“We talked about a lot of adjectives,” Wilson says of the creative process. “Then Rohner went and wrote, and we went to work on our sounds and tones.”

“Visitation” is quite a coalescence. The album (and you will hear few better ones emerge from L.A. this year) is the unlikely musical triangulation of black metal, darkwave synth-pop and angsty indie-rock. With its references to coal, ashes, various minerals and the occult – come to think of it, just about anything dark – “Visitation” could scare the bejesus out of you if not for the membranous hope in Segnitz’s pinched vocals.

If not unclassifiable, at least within the tendrils of indie rock, “Visitation” is genre-elusive. Over lunch and laughs recently, Division Day was asked what they would call the album. “‘The Blue Nile’ meets black metal,” Segnitz says. Adds Wilson, smiling: “Post-industrial blackened romantigaze … with as many layers of keyboards as humanly possible.”

Whatever its niche, “Visitation” is one of those albums that reads like a good book; Segnitz’s lyrics paint a lot of the world black, if only to illuminate the light. “There’s kind of a running theme of exploration of the occult as a metaphor for breaking down personal barriers,” the songwriter says. “There are a lot of the same things I dealt with on ‘Beartrap Island,’ but expressed more directly.”

The line from that debut album to “Visitation,” though, was anything but direct. Division Day emerged more than five years ago with an EP and then the self-released, “Beartrap Island.” They signed to an upstart label that never got started; L.A. indie Eenie Meenie came to the rescue and released a tweaked version of “Beartrap” in 2007. But lacking good tour hook-ups and much in the way of marketing muscle, Division Day foundered, its future in doubt.

After the band decided to continue, it was with renewed determination. “We felt like it had been so long since we said anything the right way, we were going to make this [bleeping] record no matter what,” Wilson says. “If we had a mission statement it was to make the record, don’t take forever and be happy.”

“I wanted this record to sound intentional, to feel really clear and confident,” Segnitz says. “We had a vague agreement about what the aesthetic would be … but there was a whole lot of not being in the same room.” After the foursome did get together to round out the demos Segnitz began, though, they felt as if they had something special.

Dangerbird’s management arm, which had handled Division Day, got the demos to another of its clients, bassist/proeucer Justin Meldal-Johnsen (Beck, Nine Inch Nails). He liked what he heard and helmed “Visitation’s” 10-day recording session with engineer Todd Burke. “What was great about working with JMJ is that he had a methodology,” Lenhart says. “We have a tendency to deliberate, but Justin had the ability to distill that.”

The result has breathed new life into a quartet many had left for dead. “We’re definitely in a better place than we were at this point last year,” Lenhart says.

An optimistic place?

Segnitz smiles. “When we’re not busy being darkly misanthropic.”

||| Live: Division Day celebrates the release of “Visitation” on Sept. 2 at Spaceland, part of a tour with labelmates Bad Veins.

“Visitation”: Highly recommended.

Photo by Timothy Norris