Popcorn Noises

Deerhunter - Halcyon Digest

Man, I sure am glad Deerhunter never finished their fourth album. Oh, what’s that you say? They did? No, that can’t be right. This is it—these elven songs are the finished product? But it’s full of holes, covered in patches with big stitches and exposed seams, and its fly is down. I mean, look at their previous work. Cryptograms was a thick, swampy stew where their dank, clanging post-punk was melted down into ambient goo and refashioned as gauzy guitar pop. They even paired it with a purported ‘third side,’ the shined-up Fluorescent Grey EP, just in case we didn’t pick up on the evolutionary sense of transformation. Then there was Microcastle, which came out as a lean slice of album-oriented guitar rock in spite of all its concessions to dreamy atmosphere. It left most of their earlier brooding tension behind for something astonishingly anthemic, so they balanced it out with the Weird Era (Cont.) collection just to prove they were still, well, weird. But in all cases, there was a certain sense of neatness. Cryptograms’ ambient and structured tracks blended perfectly and you never felt like one impulse was out of step with the other. Same goes for Microcastle’s compact and linear songs that pushed themselves nevertheless toward well-developed endings (the hit “Nothing Ever Happened” is an ideal example).

Halcyon Digest, however, finds Deerhunter working out their ideas in real time. The album opens with tentative plunks from a drum machine as “Earthquake” slowly uncurls its acoustic arpeggios and cymbal washes. It eventually works itself into a wispy, picturesque kind of clarity over the course of five minutes, but its bass-led ending sounds less like a period than a dash—a break between sections of an even longer piece. The relatively short 1-2 of “Don’t Cry” and “Revival” follows immediately behind it and I start to get this mental picture of a band in the studio, still messing around with their new batch of tunes. They feel comfortable enough with the bulk of “Earthquake” to ditch it for the slinky garage groove of “Don’t Cry,” all fuzz and jangle, but when they get to the extended bridge (the “why, oh why” part), somebody misses a cue and they just kinda stop. Bradford Cox strums out the last few chords—maybe trying to remember which lyric he was going to sing there—but they decide to launch into one of their more finished-sounding songs instead. “Revival” stands as a great single by itself, with its toy box of wooden percussion, buzzy synth, and more acoustic guitar, but it too feels cut off abruptly, just short of a more expected finale.

We’re barely three songs in at this point when most of the band goes out for a smoke break, leaving Cox to get all wistful and strum out the loose ballad “Sailing” (ahem: “You can’t take too long / making up songs”) basically on his own. But once again, another compact blast of a tune—the prickly, harmonica-tinged “Memory Boy”—picks the momentum back up and now Digest starts to feel like it’s getting a clearer sense of itself. The two Lockett Pundt-sung tracks rank along side Microcastle’s “Agoraphobia” in their honeyed, mid-tempo melodicism (Pundt’s voice is a good complement to Cox’s that way) and measured pacing, even if centerpiece “Desire Lines” lets its krautrock outro go on a couple minutes longer than it needs to. The post-shoegaze of “Helicopter” deserves every good word that’s been written about it, with its whammy-barred strums and fluently tuneful melody one-upping Cox’s work as Atlas Sound (I always wondered why he needed another project when Deerhunter can make songs like this). At the same time, “Coronado” draws attention to itself with that scratchy 50s-style saxophone, but they’ve flirted with doo-wop and soul before, at least nominally, so I don’t think anyone should be surprised. Besides, it sits much more like a ‘regular’ song recorded by a rock band than closer “He Would Have Laughed,” which bobs along on guitar loops and softened tom-toms, detouring into cumulus washes and saunter-stumbling toward a curtailed finish. Maybe it’s supposed to represent Jay Reatard’s life being cut short before its time (?), but in the context of the album I almost wonder if Deerhunter just forgot to fade it out.

It bears repeating that I don’t mean to imply that this record is somehow less vital than its lauded predecessors. In fact, when it comes to sonic quality and balance, I’d say this is the best Deerhunter have ever sounded. If Cryptograms was boggy and industrial while Microcastle was clear and insistent, Digest’s wide instrumental palate and expertly-applied effects make it glow with a warm, heavenly light beyond the reach of a lot of the reverb-addled bands aiming for blissfulness these days. Even if you consider the fragmentary, rough-hewn nature of this record a drawback (which, in this case, I obviously don’t), you’ll find the band’s instinctual balance and natural ease tough to deny. And yeah, there are lyrics about twisted memories and themes of aging and boredom and loss, but my guess is that’s not what most people will feel when they listen to it. Everyone should know by now, in spite of whatever the words say, that Deerhunter’s music is largely about loving music and being in a band, and the fact that they can put out a sketchbook-sounding record that’s better than most other bands’ labored peaks is proof of just how well they do it.