Album of the Week: Deerhunter – Halcyon Digest
What a great, great album this is.
Huge apologies for not bringing it to your attention before now. I’ve been rather inundated with music from up-and-coming acts and Bradford Cox and co hardly need my help to flog a few extra copies.
It also helps that current difficulties with my IT have meant that I’ve struggled to get at various files locked away on my computer, so it kinda had to be an album I’ve blatantly had for weeks.
That said, it’s a record worth talking about, over and over and I’m already thinking about it being a frontrunner for my World Famous* Album of the Year list.
Earthquake gets the ball rolling in a languid fashion. Misleadingly titled, and familiar in tone, it took an unprompted suggestion from a fellow Twitterer about where I may have heard it before, for the penny to drop. It was Boards of Canada, specifically, the Campfire Headphase album. Delicate acoustic guitar played over synthetic beats, with Cox’s winsome voice, was always going to be a winning formula.
The rest of the album doesn’t attempt anything remotely similar. Sailing is one-man-and-his-scratchy-guitar heartbreak while Helicopter manages to be radio-friendly and unsettling at the same time. Revival is harmony-laden fuzz pop and He Would Have Laughed, a tongue-in-cheek eulogy for the late Jay Reatard.
There’s not a duff moment on Halcyon Digest, but centrepiece Desire Lines is head and shoulders above everything else here. A beautiful sprawl, there’s a touch of shoegazing about it and it could comfortably have slipped onto a record from Cox’s Atlas Sound side project.
One of the albums of the year? I certainly think so.
*Not actually world famous… but among a widening circle of amigos, it’s always a conversation point. I’m consistently delighted by how much faith people put in my views, which is kinda why I started doing this in the first place. Ignoring my shitey wee LiveJournal page, this will be the first year that it’ll be properly blogged. Stay tuned….
It certainly is one of the albums of the year and will be making it on to my list, ready for posting next month. The guitar hook on Desire Lines seems as effortless as it is mesmeric.