Year: 2025
Label: Steinklang Industries
The drink-friendly Italians are back at it. The cover artwork and the name of the album prove that there’s no paradigm shift here. Two glasses of red wine and a beautiful woman, and We Don’t Drink Alone as title. Division S is still about the joys of drink and flesh.
But at the same time, We Don’t Drink Alone is not just a reiteration of the same stuff Division S have been doing before. On these three albums on Steinklang, there is a real trajectory. I don’t know how deliberate it is, but it strikes me as undeniable.
I’m almost afraid to say it: We Don’t Drink Alone sounds like Division S:s most sober album among the three we’ve covered (see here). The vocals are not the mumble of a drunken stupor like on previous albums, the music is not janky, wobbly and looping in a stop-go sense like on them. Instead, it’s approaching something that… well, sounds sober.
Ah, don’t be mistaken. There’s still alcohol here. Towards Never Give Up, the band launches into a weird, fall-down drunk speech about thanking one’s parents. And Until The End kicks off with the sound of drink being poured.
But still. These three albums on Steinklang sound almost like a reversal of the process of getting drunk. We Don’t Drink Alone are the first few drinks of the evening, Something To Fuck And Lose is that late evening buzz of encroaching massive inebriation, and Something To Drink & Smoke are those late, late hours when all the bars are closed but you’re too amped up, too massively drunk to go to bed.
Musically, Division S remain as hard to pigeonhole as ever. Somehow neofolk adjacent, there’s still absolutely no neofolk here. Neo-cabaret… what the heck is that even, I ask again! No, this is still a weird kind of cheap, sleazy crooner music. Nick Cave and latter day Leonard Cohen doing off-key karaoke.
Slap on to that heaps and heaps of hypnotic, weirded out psychedelia and a bit of, I dunno, chansonesque sensibilities, some jazzy bits, and you start approaching what Division S sound like. It sounds like a David Lynch take on an old 70’s hotel lobby bar with a glitzy and flashy but ultimately cheap house band playing.
It’s weird. It’s psychedelic. It has the potential to freak one out. I like it.
Out of the three albums we’ve covered, We Don’t Drink Alone is by far the easiest Division S album to approach. It’s not structurally as outlandish as the previous albums, and the overall atmosphere is more straight. Which is not to say that We Don’t Drink Alone wouldn’t be a thoroughly weird album. Because that it is. But in a more approachable fashion.
Me, I’m sort of partial to the excessive weirdness of the two preceding albums. But even so, We Don’t Drink Alone is exactly on part with them. It’s got that strange charm, that ghostly psychedelia, which appealed to me on previous albums. And, undeniably, there is merit in this being the easiest of these three albums to listen to.
Only Death Is Real 