Four years before Dumb Luck, Jimmy Tamborello found massive success as one half of indietronic darlings the Postal Service (the other half, of course, being Death Cab For Cutie’s Benjamin Gibbard).
And when I heard that the other guy from the Postal Service was releasing a record, I promise you that I wasn’t the only person who bought it without hearing anything he had done on his own before.
Usually, records this obtuse and dense don’t end up being very significant, let alone making any sort of appearance on the Billboard 200 (this peaked at #65). And while it may not necessarily sound weird sonically, like the acoustic guitar that accompanies mastermind David Longstreth’s tenor on the intro of Temecula Sunrise, whatever is going on here is enough to confound, like the rhythmic detours that same intro takes between measures, or the lyrics that pay no mind to the meter of the line singing them.
It’d be incredibly easy to write DIIV off as too trendy to be worthwhile. After all, their formula of Real Estate + Joy Division x Krautrock is tailor-made for Pitchfork’s Best New Music designation. Pitchfork also featured them in their Rising column when their name was still Dive, months before they had even finished this, their first LP. And inevitably, when this album finally dropped, the hype Pitchfork created around them culminated with the coveted “Best New Album” stamp on the top of the review (a portion of that review was featured on one of the stickers on the shrink wrap around the record when I bought it).
It’s tempting to file this under “see also: Grizzly Bear.” After all, Daniel Rossen, Department of Eagles’ primary songwriter and most-frequent vocalist vocalist is one of the two most prominent voices in Grizzly Bear, and Bear’s other vocalist, keyboardist/founder Ed Droste, is the only member of that group not to appear on this record. And for the most part, none of these songs would sound too out of place on a collection of Vickatimest B-sides (except Teenagers, probably). And it doesn’t help the case against this NOT being a Daniel Rossen solo project that Fred Nicklaus (the other member of Dept. of Eagles) receives only one unique credit on their Wikipedia page: aux percussion.
I don’t know why I don’t listen to this record more often.
While it’s true that I prefer the ambient swirls of Cryptograms and Weird Era, Cont.’s shoegaze noodlings, Halcyon Digest’s retro psych-pop sells exactly what I need sometimes. Continue reading
Disappointed that their new record, Microcastle, had leaked onto the internet and was being seeded like crazy, Deerhunter did what any sensible band would do and recorded a new album in secret to be released concurrently with it. But, prolific as they are, Weird Era Cont. is actually longer than Microcastle (only by about a minute, but regardless).
And not being given to repeating the same album twice (Cryptograms: sadface), Weird Era Cont. is often a straight noise-pop record with guitars saturated with shoegaze-ready fuzz (Vox Celeste) and playing figures oblivious to the vocal melody (Ghost Outfit, Slow Swords). Even the title track is played with nothing but feedbacking guitars.
A few of the tracks pair this bent towards noise with doowop influenced pop, such as the instrumental Moon Witch Cartridge and the excellent, dreamy Vox Humana. Admittedly, I’ve never considered shoegaze doowop to be a viable genre, but Deerhunter, with their unstoppable combination of talent and taste*, not only make it work, but they make it work beautifully.
The album closes with the ten minute Calvary Scars II/Aux Out, a remake of the 1:37 long bare-bones track that appeared on Microcastle. Here, free of Cox’s desire to stray away from effects pedals and lingering arrangements, Calvary Scars blooms into a dreampop epic, complete with a repeating chord structure, layers and layers of guitars, wordless melodies, and pounding drums until it falls into a hazy wash of noise that wouldn’t be out of place on Cryptograms. This reversion to reverb and ambience is elemental to Weird Era Cont., informing the decisions made and directions taken from track to track, making it a strong member of the Deerhunter canon and (admittedly) my second favorite Deerhunter album.
*every band has talent. Not every band has taste.
With less haze this time around, Deerhunter made just about everyone’s end-of-the-year list, and that in a year that saw Kanye West, TV on the Radio, Beck, and a reunited Portishead releasing records. Continue reading
Atlas Sound) and Locket Pundt (a.k.a. Lotus Plaza), even if technically, the band released two albums and an EP before any official release from either one.
Despite their success, Deerhunter is the archetypal garage band–a group of young bucks banging out songs who love listening to music as much as they love creating it, as evidenced by the band blog, curated mostly by Bradford Cox, and the hour long Krautrock version of My Sherona played at an Atlas Sound show.
But despite their prolificacy and media frenzy around them (read: Cox, the most controversial member of the group), Deerhunter first and foremost makes excellent music. Cryptograms, their second album and breakthrough (and the first Deerhunter album Cox doesn’t disown) is absolutely, one hundred percent excellent, and it remains my favorite. The album is split into two halves (on vinyl, two discs). The first half is more atmospheric, with an occasional song peering out of the ambient fog of droning guitars and synthesizers with meaty bass lines and heavily-echoed vocals. “Lake Somerset” veers closely to ambient dance punk, while “Octet,” but for its one-note bass pound, might escape a casual listener for its ambience.
The second half is the conceptual opposite: of the five tracks, only one (“Tape Hiss Orchid”) is an instrumental. The rest are hazy pop songs with hypnotic pounds and shoegazy guitar jangles over trance-like vocals. With the inclusion of the Fluorescent Grey EP on the fourth side, this record almost becomes two separate albums, one more ambient focused and the other pop-song centric.
But the remarkable thing is, they do both well, impressing on each half of the record. Sadly though, as their career has progressed, Deerhunter (and Atlas Sound) have moved away from the atmospheric aspects of their palette. And while the rest of their catalogue is just as excellent, no one does ambient indie rock the way they do here, leaving a void that only Cryptograms can fill.
The question may be asked why anyone would own a double disc live album from a band whose only widely recognizable tune is “Smoke on the Water.” For me, the answer is probably because my dad had it and it had “Smoke on the Water” on it. Continue reading