Well I picked up the new Deerhunter record close to the end of last year without knowing much of what to expect. Unfortunately I had never seen them live before but I actually have seen Bradford Cox doing a solo set opening up for the Freewheelin’ Yo La Tengo back at the Lakeshore Theater in Chicago in 2007. When I saw him do his solo thing live it involved a LOT of delay pedals and guitar tricks to create extensive loops and basically snowballing walls of noise. There were moments that were really cool and some moments I didn’t really care for, but it was intriguing for sure. It didn’t really make me a mega-fan, but I was intrigued and then I snagged this record and I have to say it is some fantastic stuff.

The only songs I specifically remember from that set that appears on the record here is “Activa”, one of the more out there songs on the record, and at least the beginning part of “Microcastle”, and I seem to remember a lot of the songs being similar to those. Possibly “Cavalry Scars” as well. So imagine my surprise when this album hits you with a brilliant opening of “Cover Me (slowly)” into “Agoraphobia”. They are pretty much just part 1 and 2 of the same song, as I alluded to in our album intro post a while back, but together it is a great fucking song. It is slow, simple indie pop perfectly executed in every way, with jangling guitars backed with walls of noise. Very cool. The hits continue with “Never Stops”, which once again has a simple picked beginning that leads into an awesome chorus of “It Never Stops”. It is all at once totally familiar yet completely fresh, which makes it such a great listen. “Little Kids” goes even slower and more spacey, but continues the greatness. It has such an innocent yet maniacal sound to it, kind of almost slyly evil.

“Microcastle” starts out as a dreamy guitar and vocal only, almost nursery rhyme-esque, then escalating into rock out mode a little way through. “Cavalry Scars” is a short but sweet atmospheric jam. “Green Jacket” is a very cool piano song, with a fairly steady riff throughout that leads into a slower, spacier outro that is nice. “Activa” I mentioned before was the one I most remembered from seeing Cox before, and I wasn’t really huge on that song before, as I am not now. It is sleepy with the same riff rolling over and over and various clinks and clanks laid out behind it.

He takes us out of the space vacuum for “Nothing Ever Happened” which is a standard indie rock song that has a very lively beat to it, which continues on with some cool bass riffs and offbeat vocals into a very melodious outro that just flat out works. “Saved By Old Times” is almost folky, with an awesome scale run down as the riff. Simple but effective. “Neither Of Us, Uncertainly” is once again a space-out jam, but still grounded in reality with just a heavily tremolo’d guitar giving it that spacey quality. “Twilight At Carbon Lake” is a cool finisher that really works with the rest of the record and ties it all back together quite well.

I really like this album a lot. I think the great achievement of this album is that it has the perfect mix of accessibility and complexity. It straddles that fence throughout but never sounds hokey while doing it. There are so many cool hooks and sounds in here that it draws you in so that when he throws some off the wall shit at you it doesn’t turn you off but rather you are just like ‘wow, that was pretty wild’. I can see how this album wouldn’t be for everyone, as it certainly does not fall into the guilty pleasure category most of the records I have reviewed recently do. At times it is beautiful and at times it is fugly, but it just works so damn well together that you just have to love it.

I should also note that pretty much every non-digital version of the album that I have seen comes with a second disc, “Weird Era Continued”, that has some pretty awesome stuff on it, so I recommend if getting this album you check out that option.

BV Rate: 86

Deerhunter – Agoraphobia – From Microcastle
Deerhunter – Little Kids – From Microcastle