Deerhunter’s Magnum Opus in a Weird Era

Deerhunter’s astonishing new album (and its companion) is more than a trip into the mind of a physically- and emotionally-tattered frontman. It’s a collaboration between a band creating music that is meant to heal you of physical and emotional anguish. Bradford Cox believes this with every ounce of his generous soul. After speaking to a Atlanta-based composer at a dinner party, Cox was convinced that music had a healing effect on physical ailments, and he’s not entirely off his rocker. There is an emerging field of health care called Music Therapy, which uses music to heal. There is an increasing use of music therapy in hospitals to help with pain management, ward off depression, calm patients and ease muscle tension. We are talking about a musician who once wrote a song to be played for a girl who was about to have major heart surgery. We may have found our new indie-rock hero in Bradford Cox, especially since Jeff Mangum is technically still a recluse. I’m sure Cox would denounce such a suggestion, but he really doesn’t have a choice after releasing a devastating solo effort and a tandem of Deerhunter albums in Microcastle and Weird Era Cont. Microcastle is not only leaps and bounds better than any album released this year, it may just be the best of this decade (well, the best since Strawberry Jam). Bold words for a relatively unknown band who have survived mostly on hype to this point.

The album picks up where the mezmorizing last track, “Heatherwood”, on 2007′s Cryptograms left off. The opening track, “Cover Me (Slowly),” is a short Flaming Lips-esque instrumental that opens things up in epic fashion. The album goes right into the sign of great things to come in “Agoraphobia.” The track is actually sung by guiatarist Lockett Pundt, who uses some witty wordplay, over a simple bass line and lazy guitars. “Come for me, cover me, come for me, comfort me | I had a dream, no longer to be free.” The next track is one of the album’s highlights (and there are many). “Never Stops” combines some pretty dreary lyrics from Bradford Cox against a great bass line and drums. The album’s first real sign of “noise” comes in during one of the song’s choruses, in which Cox finds several different ways to stress the rythm in each word (“It Never Stops”). The guitars are beautifully layered, and the band’s signature shoe-gaze sound appears. One of the more innocent-sounding tracks, “Little Kids,” contains some of the darkest lyrics on the album. Cox explained the lyrics in a recent interview he did with Anthem Magazine:

I guess what I was getting at was the idea of kids being really innocent and the idea of these thug kids drinking gin, like little kids drinking gin, setting old people on fire. The outro “to get older still,” kids always want to be older than they are and when they’re old they’re like ‘I wish I was a kid again.’

The title track, “Microcastle,” follows and is another gem (especially live). The song starts with soft guitar and the soft, crooning voice of Cox. The softest song of the album slowly builds until the drums kick into a crescendo of sound highlighted by loud, layered guitars. There is plenty of feedback/distortion/reverb, yet it doesn’t distract from the incredible melody of the guitar chords and the Thom Yorke-ish humming of Cox throughout the guitar breakdown. The album slows down for a while with three shorter, perfectly composed tracks, “Calvary Scars,” “Green Jacket, and “Activa.” “Green Jacket” contains some of the most personal lyrics Cox has written to date. The sincerity in his delivery of “I take what I can, I give what I have left” is revealing and haunting.

The next track on the album, “Nothing Even Happened,” is my pick for song of the year. It begins with one of the coolest bass lines and drumbeats imaginable, followed by melodic guitar chords. The song goes somewhat quiet, while the album’s best bass line leads into the lyrics. Cox sings most of the lyrics in the same key as the accompanying guitar (Ozzy Osbourne-style). The song then steers into the most impressive three minutes on the album. Dueling guitars play rather simple, repeated chords. The sound is layered and creates an ethereal feel. The song climaxes with a high-pitched guitar that breaks into a mini-solo, while the other guitar picks up again. Cox has said he doesn’t think of himself or his band as good guitar players and relies on other elements to write good songs. However, watching them play this song live last week was a treat and would lead you to believe otherwise. The concept behind the song is pretty demented. Cox explains:

I had this concept. I wanted the song to be the most bitter song ever. I was thinking about a woman who is kind of abandoned by her family. Maybe her husband abandoned her and her kid. Then she raised her kid. She’s a single mom, works at Wal-Mart, no health insurance. Then her kids grow up to resent her and then they go off and start a meth lab or something. Then the woman is just this lonely old woman who did her best and everyone has abandoned her and then all of a sudden she gets hit by a transport truck on the way to her fucking shitty Wal-Mart job. She never got to take a vacation. She never got to experience something romantic. I wanted to write a song that was an Ouija board for people that died without ever really getting to ever live.

“Saved By Old Times” is another great track that may be the biggest departure from anything Deerhunter has recorded before. By no means is this a bad thing. The bluesy guitars and lyrics play off of another great bass line. The song features guest vocals (via iChat) from Cole Alexander of the Black Lips. Alexander is actually heard on two overlapping rants that lead into the song’s big, noisy, shoe-gaze finish. Cox channels Thom Yorke’s vocal melodies in one of the album’s prettiest songs, “These Hands.” The track features the album’s only real downtime during the track’s final minute, a style that was all over Deerhunter’s previous effort, Cryptograms. That album contained more ambient, instrumental tracks that were used as a build-up effect for louder, more straight-forward songs. Microcastle is more cohesive, and this was purposeful:

We were more focused on producing a more cohesive record, A… B… I think that the press and things like that had to do a lot with the last record and this record is not very inward looking. It’s not very personal. It’s more of a rock record. Its got its cathartic moments and I’m leaving it more for the audience, if they relate to that type of catharsis. Put the music to their own experience. We’re not trying to talk as much about my experience or overly invest my own personal life or my personality traits into the music. Let’s just make a record with songs that people can relate to and live their own lives to and have their own stories about, because you know that’s what it’s all about anyways. It’s not about what a song means to me, it’s what it means to the audience. I stopped feeling sorry for myself and being like adolescent, overly nostalgic, you know.

The album’s closer, “Twilight at Carbon Lake,” slows things down to a crawl with a soft guitar melody and even softer, drowned out lyrics from Cox, which he admits were completely adlibbed for the track just to match the guitar:

A lot of times I write lyrics off the top of my head like Lil Wayne. I’m not even joking. “Twilight at Carbon Lake,” seems like it means something but it’s just free styling over a guitar track so that I would know what the cadence of the vocals would be when I finally did write lyrics but I never really wrote lyrics and just left it as it was.

The song ends with a generous amount of noise and layers. A bulk of the album would leave you to believe that Cox and company relied on numerous guitar pedals and effects, but he reveals that none were used on the album:

I used no effects or pedals on anything on that album. The only thing I used was singing through an amplifier that had tremolo. There are no effects on “Twilight at Carbon Lake” at all; it’s all just guitar, bass, drums and vocals . . . The thing is that there are ambient sounds in that song but they’re created with tape. The cymbal going backwards throughout the whole song, it sounds really eerie, it’s just a tape running backwards. There’s no pedals used, there’s no effects.

Most music sites are publishing reviews of Deerhunter’s Weird Era Cont. as if it were a side B to the breathtaking Microcastle. First of all, this is an insult to fans of both albums. Second, Weird Era Cont. was a reaction to the previous record’s leak. Microcastle was leaked six months early. Instead of getting frustrated about the unfortunate turn of events, the band simply went back into the studio and recorded another album, an astonishing series of events, especially considering the result. Cox has been quoted as saying he yearns for the day when fans saved up their money for a new album and impatiently waited. They knew the album was going to be great, and each track was new to them.

I want there to be some excitement and some anticipation, because it’s very important, especially to younger people. When I was in high school I was always excited when a new record came out. There’s a new Animal Collective record coming out; I don’t want to own it before it comes out. I want to look forward to it because I know that it’s gonna be amazing. So I want to recapture the excitement I had when I was a kid about a record coming out that I know is going to be exciting. And then I want to put it on the day it comes out and listen to it all the way through.

Weird Era Cont. really deserves its own review. Released as a companion CD to Microcastle, it is surprisingly impressive in its own right. Highlights include the groove-laden “Operation,” the obsessively catchy “Dot Gain,” the Atlas Sound-ing “Slow Swords,” and the epic, Animal Collective-esque “Calvary Scars II Aux Out.” The latter is the second part of a song inspired by the explicit photograph on the left. Cox wrote about and posted this photo on his blog, revealing that he believed the photo to be real. Obviously affected by it, Cox wrote the lyrics for “Calvary Scars” from the perspective of the crucified boy:

crucified on a cross in front of all my closet friends
crucified on a a cross (in front)
crucified by my hero who supplies the cross and nails
crucified with backstage passes
crucified on drum throne

Cox went on to say that he also wished to kill off the adolescent character that has influenced everything he writes. Between Microcastle and Weird Era Cont. there are 25 songs, which play like 80-minutes of music therapy. And let’s keep in mind one thing, this band is still very young (Cox is 26), and each release has gotten progressively better. A scary thought for things to come.

Cox has stated that his intention is not to write the perfect song. He writes by stream of consciousness, which reflects all internal and external forces influencing his psychology at a single moment in an attempt to be spontaneous and unedited and recreate a raw experience. His approach is to see how many interesting layers he can pile up in one song, and then goes from there. He collects a scrapbook of sound ideas and makes music constantly, fearing he may not be alive next month. Cox says his band cannot last on the hype that surrounds them and doesn’t want their music to appeal to uppidy music snobs. He just wants to make the records that he wants to make.

Fuck hype, plus I mean we were never that hyped. I mean look at us and then look at other bands. If people want to call us a fucking hype band…call me a hype band when I sell 50, 000 records. Call me a hype band when I’m fucking doing my second appearance on Letterman. We’re not a fucking hype band. We’re an underground cult band; I mean were a cult rock band. That’s what we want to be, we’re not a fucking hype band.

Let Microcastle serve as an official end to the hype.

Ex-band mate and friend, Adam Bruneau, created videos for two songs off the album. Below you will find the unofficial videos for “Cover Me (Slowly)” and “Microcastle.”

http://deerhuntertheband.blogspot.com/
http://myspace.com/deerhunter