If nothing else, no one can accuse Deerhunter of making the same album twice. Their discography has shifted between hypnotic shoegaze to abrasive garage rock to doo-wop informed dream pop. But their discography is even further augmented by Atlas Sound and Lotus Plaza, the twin solo projects of co-lead singers Bradford Cox and Locket Pundt.
At first glance, it might seem like shoegazers/indie rockers Deerhunter are subject to their eccentric and unpredictable leader, Bradford Cox. He hogs most of the attention, and most of the press is focused on his singular strangeness.
But looking deeper, you’ll notice that Locket Pundt has just as strong a hand in the group. One listen to his work as Lotus Plaza proves that.
The Locket Pundt-led “Ad Astra” is a strong foray into new wave balladry (that coda though!). “Breakers” is the most crystalline piece they’ve ever done, with a breezy chorus that’s the best candidate for being used in an Apple commercial they’ve ever done. “Snakeskin” alone retains Monomania’s scuzzy funk, crashing with their first noise collage since Microcastle (“Ad Astra” has one too), an album whose weirdness makes several small returns throughout the running time.
As I have mentioned before, Cryptograms is my favorite Deerhunter record. Its more ambient passages are absolutely transcendent in a way that so many shoegaze/dreampop bands fail to emulate better.
But, as I have mourned, as Bradford Cox & Co. continue making music, they slip further and further away from the glistening haze they crafted so masterfully and more towards direct pop rock.
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.
As I’ve progressed through Atlas Sound’s discography, there is a very clear trend; atmospheres become less of a focal point, the vocals are higher in the mix, and the lyrics are more coherent. The album art follows suit—Let The Blind featured a picture he liked, Logos had a picture of his Marfan Syndrome affected torso with his face blurred out with a flash.
Continue reading
For a few months, I played this record just about every day.
This had a lot to do with the fact that my car’s built-in iPod interface made it very difficult to access bands buried deep in the alphabet, but still, I didn’t mind. It’s an absolutely beautiful record, and it’s rewarding both in the background and in headphones. Continue reading