Deerhunter

Deerhunter frontman Bradford Cox is known primarily for his music, but coming in at a close second is his renown for being a loose-lipped, emotional, frightfully underweight, sundress-wearing crackpot.  His madman antics, often made manifest on his blog, not to mention his confrontational stage act, are prone to offend everyone from the uptight to those who appreciate his atmospheric, often lovely music.  Tellingly, the subtitle on his blog is a quote from controversial French author and activist Jean Genet, a man whose promotion of overt sexuality and criminality once landed him on America’s banned book list.  The quote reads, “To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.”  It’s not too much of a stretch to consider that quote Cox’s artistic thesis, and it presents itself spectacularly on Microcastle, Deerhunter’s highly anticipated third album. 

It is likely that Microcastle will be recognized as a calming of the waters after the storm, as it is much more fluid and accessible than its predecessor, the unrelentingly polarizing Cryptograms.  Where the critically-acclaimed though highly-debated Cryptograms managed to be brooding and calamitous, not to mention uneven and frustrating, Microcastle is a study in subtlety and unity.  This isn’t to say all the Sonic Youth squall has been washed away, because it surely hasn’t—it has just been arranged with a little more care.  Case in point: the song “Never Stops” has a near-constant whine underpinning the meat of the song (not to mention adding ironic support to the title).  While on Cryptograms it may have been a source of distraction, here it’s buried deep in the mix and acts as a palette on which the real song is painted. 

And this gets to the crux of Microcastle: at its root, it is a gathering of uncompromising pop songs.  There is not a song on the album which would drive a child to nightmares, and surely even your mother could find some of the more luxuriant sonic tapestries to be aurally appealing.  In the past, Cox has used his solo project, Atlas Sound, to dig into soft sounds, letting Deerhunter take aim at the ear-splitting.  Microcastle, on the other hand, feels like a fusion of the two—truly, it is a less angry affair, and you can even feel the shimmering influence of smiling 1960s pop in these songs.  

When it comes to recognizing stand-out tracks, the task becomes a tad difficult, if only because of the album’s completeness.  The aforementioned “Never Stops” qualifies, and “Little Kids” uses a pressure-cooking refrain (“To get older, still”) to haunt itself into an almost silently-bubbling tension, only to deny release by fading near-seamlessly into the calmness of the following track.  “Nothing Ever Happened” uses propulsive drumming and a hooky chorus to be the song most likely to show up on mix CDs, and its placement on the album’s strong back half acts as a sort of scaffolding around which the rest of the record is built; by the time the guitar riff goes mad, well after the four minute mark, the song has already solidified itself as an undeniable strength.  But while the fantastic track “Saved by Old Times” is effortlessly buoyant, and “Neither Of Us, Uncertainly” is a calming dreamscape, Microcastle is an album’s album, and its peaks and valleys (such as its somewhat soft middle section) all work towards the record’s whole. 

Ultimately, Microcastle is an album that rewards the patient listener, and it will likely deliver a slew of new fans to the Deerhunter ship.  The album contains fewer abrasive moments and head-jerking displays of Cox’s paranoia and eccentricity than on earlier work, yet all of the intricate niceties of their sound remain intact.  Truly, by the time the final song hits its home stretch of wailing vocals and perhaps the album’s most clattering wall of sound, it’s clear that this complex and confident collection is destined to land, deservedly, on a bunch of those infamous year-end best-of lists.