Deerhunter review that is way too long and wordy

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Deerhunter – Don’t Cry

Deerhunter – Helicopter

Deerhunter – Earthquake

Don’t be fooled by the swaths of trippy guitar loops and backwards-sounds that begin “Earthquake,” which begins Halcyon Digest – the album is the first project from main songwriter/serial album-releaser Bradford Cox to shed his mitigating avant-garde tendencies (Microcastle’s jams and frequent dynamic shifts; Atlas Sound/Cryptograms’s lame-but-aesthetically-I-guess-it-makes-sense ambient sound-paintings; the vast tracts of internet-only mp3s; the poop blog) in favor of an old-time religion of classic summertime pop sensibilities. This transition, this inversion of priorities, is almost seamless, both impressively pretty and pretty impressive – the album brims with catchy melodies and infectious enthusiasm and lush choral harmonies, the words of which are either nonsense-in-the-style-of-Radiohead (“now they are through with me”; “it’s not a house anymore”) or literal nonsense (“oh why oh why oh why oh why”; “uuuhhh waaah wuuuh wuuh-uh”).

Perhaps owing to Cox’s professed affinity for minimalist avant-garde music, the band has always had a striking sense of economy – a sense that only a few notes can bear an immense weight. “Memory Boy,” “Coronado,” “Don’t Cry,” and “Revival” – the latter two are mortal locks for the Deerhunter 20^th Century Masters Collection – are all assembled from four chords or less, but boast an army’s worth of expertly-placed wailing thrift-store instruments and a gospel-like fervor that the band has kept secret until now (we didn’t have any reason to believe it even existed until Atlas Sound dropped “Shelia” on our bullshit). Conversely, “Helicopter” and “Earthquake” utilize this economy as Deerhunter usually tend to – each is a very good song made from very few parts, lush and expansive without being contrived. Something to think about: engineer Ben Allen, whose similar production work with another lush and expansive but decidedly minimalist band (Animal Collective, on Merriweather Post Pavilion) suggests that he’s the Nigel Godrich (or Albini or whatever) of druggy, eccentric, and vaguely-pastoral pop music.

Halcyon Digest’s missteps are minimal, though obvious – the innocuous, seven-minute-long “Desire Lines” clumsily cuts the album in half, imitating everything that’s wrong about Sonic Youth’s recent discography; “Sailing” is Cox and his guitar, doing their singer-songwriter thing; the chorus of “Basement Scene,” which is mostly moaning, doesn’t deserve its fantastic bedroom-pop verse melody; and “He Would Have Laughed” (dedicated to Cox’s friend, Jay Reatard) is an excellent two-minute pop song prefaced by a meandering drum circle jam sesh. These missteps seem mostly to be indicative of a band whose refusal to repeat itself coaxes it into writing songs that, though differentiated from the rest of the album, are relatively insubstantial (“Desire Lines,” in particular, pales in comparison with songs half its length and double its enthusiasm).

Here’s the toughest thing for me to articulate – objectively, Halcyon Digest might be Deerhunter’s best work; they’ve reined-in the avant-garde proclivities and sharpened their pop songwriting skills to a previously unthought-of level of sharpness. But Halcyon Digest functions mostly as a step sideways – Cox’s intentional redrawing of Deerhunter’s accessibility might ultimately be the best thing for them (especially if they’re concerned about, y’know, appealing to a more general audience), but it’s not easy teach a dog different tricks (or, if your dog is stupid, teaching it anything at all). And so Halcyon Digest, an apple to Microcastle’s orange, is a pretty damn good album in the middle of what would appear to be a transitional period. The learning curve sucks.