Deerhunter's artsy second full-length record is about contrast; dissonant but melodic, loud and bold yet dreamy and peaceful. Like Spiritualized on a bad trip, the first half is noisy, moody, and mostly instrumental except for Bradford Cox's occasional, heavily distorted sing-talking. But it shifts gears on "Spring Hall Convert" when the music lightens into lo-fi shoegazer pop. Elsewhere you'll find clanging punk, drone rock, and minimalist psychedelia. Sounds like a disjointed experience, right? Well, yeah, it is somewhat, but stay with it. After a few listens you'll hear the consistent sonic smarts that unify the record's wandering tone. The title track for instance comes off like watered-down Joy Division until the feedback kicks in, and the giant guitar blare sets off a charging momentum. A song like "Hazel St." has a goofier appeal, with its slightly awkward intro and loopy melodies. But there's nothing awkward about how the song generously unfolds so that by the end, the only thing goofy is the grin on your face. Such dynamism makes you wish they'd take a little more time in the studio to smooth out some of the record's rough edges, but then again, does the world need another glossy, over-produced record? Enjoy Cryptograms for its messy and scattered charm as well as its deceptively complex intelligence. --Matthew Cooke
Review by Marisa Brown
Deerhunter's first album, the self-titled release from Atlanta-based Stickfigure, was a cacophonous, messy, punk-driven record that banged and pulsated along in the shock and anger after bass player Justin Bosworth's sudden death in 2004. By the time the band set about recording their second album, however, they had added another guitarist, one who focused more on twisting and mechanizing sound, and had calmed down considerably. Because of this, much of Cryptograms meanders about in the experimental realm, where swells and layers matter more than melody or structure. It does make for contrast, this ebb-and-flow against the greater discord of the sung pieces, but these instrumentals don't do enough to actually mean anything. From the "Intro" to "Red Ink" to "Providence" there's a kind of tired consistency played out in the delayed guitar that works to make the record almost commonplace, despite its avant-garde leanings. The more "conventional" tracks, those with words, decipherable or not (generally not), work a little better. More interesting and complex musically, they weave guitar and basslines with driving chords and heavy drums, the same energy before spent on reverb now given to rhythm and composition. Lyrics, courtesy of frontman Bradford Cox, are sparse but intentional, like the repeated muffled yell of "there was no sound" in the title cut, or the echoed call of "I was the corpse that spiraled out" in the nearly eight-minute long "Octet." Cryptograms is pained, sometimes angry, sometimes reflective (and once, in the out-of-place indie pop "Strange Lights," oddly content) music that aims for the provocative and the esoteric. Occasionally, like in the wonderfully spastic "Lake Somerset," Deerhunter successfully accomplish that, but more often than that they overreach and end up hitting something much more ordinary, predictably "experimental" choices in a genre that's supposed to be anything but. Yes, there's a greater recognition of the importance of maturity and structure and intellectualism here, but it's overshadowed by a heightened sense of gravitas and a concern for the unconventional that ends up dulling whatever it is they may have created.
Deerhunter
Cryptograms
[Kranky; 2007]
Rating: 8.9
In Dennis Cooper's 1987 novel Closer, young George Miles gets totally fucked. Poor kid probably just wants to be loved-- either that or trip out on acid and live in Disneyland, whichever is more realistic-- but he falls prey to charlatans of all stripes. Old-fart perverts deface his flesh with loveless sexual violence. "Do you know what's inside that cute body of yours?" one asks, then comes brutally close to exposing the answers.
Atlanta five-piece Deerhunter, who hailed Cooper as a primary influence in a recent Dusted feature, show their guts admirably on this vast, visceral second album. Arranged in chronological sequence from two distinct recording sessions, Cryptograms is alternately murky and ethereal, amorphous and incisive, shot through with Sonic Youth guitar squall, Spacemen 3's blissful hymns, the morbidly introspective drum sounds of early Factory Records productions, and the abstract sonic richness of Harold Budd's collaborations with Brian Eno.
The album's willfully cryptic first half opens with a psych-out, both musically and mentally. Out of a nature scene's tranquility, a foreboding bassline and bird-calling keyboards summon singer Bradford Cox, who kicks off the galvanizing title track with a declaration of regret: "My greatest fear/ I fantasized/ The days were long/ The weeks flew by/ Before I knew/ I was awake/ My days were through/ It was too... late." As the song careens toward an increasingly chaotic climax, Cox finds his senses deteriorating until the final, indefinite repetition of the closing mantra: "There was no sound." Underpinned by Josh Fauver's primal bass and Moses Archuleta's paranoid drums, the similarly bleak "Lake Somerset" is a scream-saturated stomper with largely obscured lyrics about murder and pissing. No wonder Cox endured daily panic attacks throughout its recording.
"The skinniest man on the face of the Earth," claim the MySpacers. "He suffers from Marfan syndrome, try not to insult him," others retort. The 1 in 5,000 Americans affected are typically tall, thin, and at risk of heart problems. Source(s): MySpace, March of Dimes.
Deerhunter aren't content just to put their least welcoming side forward. Cryptograms also intersperses its loosely structured songs with a handful of extended, largely instrumental ambient passages. Guitarists Colin Mee and Lockett Pundt know their delay pedals-- the drifting chords on "White Ink" ring with the same washed-out analog shimmer that made Flying Saucer Attack's Further so powerfully nostalgic, gradually filling in with low end as keyboards and vocal effects add layers of texture off in the distance. The dream-like "Providence", written on a Rhode Island tour stop with Lightning Bolt, sounds at once radiant and terrified. "Octet" finds Cox's cries muffled behind the maelstrom, until the drums and bass lock together in the second half, erupting in a static-drenched propulsion that doesn't let up until a busy-signal organ tone segues into the droning, bell-swathed "Red Ink". The album's first half concludes with the tape to which the band recorded literally spinning off its reel.
"She said, 'Dream dreams the dreamer'/ I said it's not my fault." An earlier recording session was scrapped for, among other reasons, a poorly calibrated tape machine. At least one song here was written after several Ambien. Deerhunter's original bass player died in a tragic skateboarding accident; he'd just gotten clean. Source(s): Television, Bradford Cox.
That first 30 minutes of Cryptograms is a slow but steady build towards the vastly more accessible latter half, recorded several months after the first. Opening with the perpetual climax of "Spring Hall Convert", these songs depict a Deerhunter reborn-- if not happy, then at least comfortably numb. Here, all that brooding sludge-psych and those airy backgrounds give way to swooning dream-pop and comparatively lucid songwriting: "Strange Lights" is the first track on Cryptograms with clearly decipherable lyrics, Cox waxing childlike about "walking to the sun," bathed in bright, lambent guitars. The gauzy growing-up reminiscence "Hazel St." asks for protection in pop-glorified sunlight; portentous finale "Heatherwood", with its ramshackle percussion, promises another reincarnation. "Was not seen again," several voices repeat, ending not with a bang but with an enigmatic whistle.
The Deer Hunter is a movie. "Deer Hunter" is a game. Deerhunter are a band that sometimes gets called Deer Hunter. Deerhoof are somebody else. Source(s): Twenty-five years on Earth, Google.
Of course, even the second recording session's highly melodic space-outs aren't fully coherent. As Cox laments in "Hazel St.", "The subject is always just out of frame." At this point, with an album called Cryptograms, you're weird if you haven't been wondering what, exactly, the encoded message might be-- if, in fact, there is one at all. I like to think it's that Deerhunter are a pop band.
After all, while Cryptograms presents its own obstacles, it's easily enjoyed as a whole. Memorable melodies and an awkward, charismatic narrator are often peeking from behind the dissonance-laden mists that self-consciously choke them. From The Velvet Underground & Nico to Sid and Nancy, the sweetest romance of the rock underground's life was always death. And the tragic beauty of Cryptograms, as to an extent with Cooper's novels, is the way something as innocent as pop can be so mercilessly corrupted-- and due to the ensuing tension, emerge as better art for it.
-Marc Hogan, January 30, 2007
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