4Q Magazine

Deerhunter - Halcyon Digest (Review)

by James Carney on 5.10.10


Halcyon Digest
(4AD, 2010)

For a band with such a distinctive sound, Deerhunter have yet to falter with discovering different ways to present their music. Fourth record, Halcyon Digest is less concerned with the physical and the decay of the physical than previous releases, preferring the themes of memory and nostalgia, which inform every aspect of the album. The record moves from genre to genre with a sense of cohesion and without any track feeling too much like “the Brian Wilson track” or the “the 50’s dance hall experiment”. Almost completely gone are any allusions to punk or full blown oceans of ambient, instead replaced with more stripped down and classicist pop; the arrangements themselves being most spare and deliberate yet seen of the band.

‘Basement Scene’ begins with a simple early 60’s melody alongside warm and spacious production that emulates the sound of old vinyl. It’s perhaps the closest the band have come to creating the effect of sepia in sound; particularly when the reverb and decay on Bradford Cox’s vocal depicts the way memories can seem to evaporate and disappear. ‘Sailing’ is the closest you’ll have heard Cox to doing an earnest early 90’s Billy Corgan ballad, and ‘Revival’ is perhaps the most solid dance track they’ve put to record. That is to say one could imagine it in an alternate universe version of the Uma Thurman/John Travolta restaurant scene from Pulp Fiction. Special recognition is owed to guitarist Lockett Pundt for his lead vocals on ‘Desire Lines’ and ‘Fountain Stairs’, and also to the particularly unusual penultimate track, ‘Coronado’, which has Cox gruff up and put on his best Julian Casablancas impression, whilst a saxophone beefs up the chorus and noodles about. In a sense, it’s much stranger than the band’s most raw and avant-garde output.

Though Halcyon Digest perhaps doesn’t feel as self-contained and sonically homogenous as Microcastle did, it’s still a very impressive collection of pop songs taken in and out of the context of time, subjectivity, and memory; and truly expands the boundaries of what Deerhunter are considered to be. It isn’t that they’ve “gone soft”, or even that they’re starting to sound similar to Atlas Sound, Cox’s solo project. Rather, it’s that the band and producer Ben H. Allen (Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion) have managed to craft an album about memory and nostalgia not just through recording songs dealing with the topic, but using space, the absence of sound, familiar melodies, and disintegrating vocals to recreate the essence of memory and nostalgia. Some of Halcyon Digest’s sound is heard and the rest is inferred; the feeling isn’t always shown, it is sometimes suggested in its absence. This amounts to either a sonically stripped down Deerhunter release, or their most complicated, or perhaps both; but it most certainly cements their position as one of the most interesting bands currently producing music.

Image Gallery

Sorry! No images in this gallery

Share:




Bookmark with:

Comment