Down There

Animal Collective is not every indie kid’s favorite band. In fact I hear some actually prefer Titus Andronicus, and the ones who’ve never been to Brooklyn like The Arcade Fire. There are probably a fair amount of kids traversing Brooklyn in skinny jeans and baseball caps (their brims un-folded) who could only name one member of the Animal Collective: Panda Bear. Noah Lennox has gotten to be the loveable member of Animal Collective, despite seeming more socially awkward and reticent than his band mates and never quite sharing equal billing with Animal Collective’s core member Dave Portner or Avey Tare, compositionally. Panda Bear is a great songwriter, but his songs don’t overshadow Tare’s as the great disparity in the popularities of their solo works suggest. Avey Tare sings less like Sting. His solo work lacks the swaggering hip hop beats of “Slow Motion.” He is not a dad, yet. He doesn’t live in Lisbon. These might all be a part of the problem.

Down There opens with “Laughing Hieroglyphics,” a seven minute song that evokes a hung-over morning after a night at a frightening vaudevillian carnival. Based largely on an accordion, which instantly brings his wife, who played accordion in múm, to mind, it might be the album’s best track. The album is somewhat top-heavy, with many of its best tracks appearing in the first half , but much like Animal Collective’s 2005 album Feels, (on which Avey Tare wrote every song but one) the album picks up again toward the end after a spacey lull. Unlike Feels, this lull is under ten minutes long and it is not the best part of the album. If Feels captured the motes dancing in the percolating sunlight of a valley and then receded into a dark, mystical forest only to emerge again triumphant at a sunny shoreline, Down There seems to follow a temporal arc that could not be more different, but is also oddly the same.

The light one wakes up in during “Laughing Hieroglyphics” is like the city on a foggy morning. Down There is a little chilly, and sounds like a cross-town walk on a sleepy morning of a day on which the sun never truly rises. “3 Umbrellas” is as close to ebullience as Down There gets. Its lyrical imagery and plinking piano evoke soft rain. Its guitar passages (which are masked exactly as those on Fall Be Kind are) play the haze. The dubiously titled “Oliver Twist” sounds subterranean, evokes a long cluttered wait for the R train. Avey Tare’s voice’s pitch is tweaked to eerie and hooky effect. Its chorus is the catchiest on the album, and is shrouded in rustling and wafting drones that would not have been foreign to an early Small Black song.

Like Feels, night falls, but when it does the sun doesn’t rise. There are a few slower songs that recede from the listener’s attention, flowing seamlessly into one another, one of Down There’s most admirable characteristics. The segues between songs are orchestrated perfectly, reminiscent of AC’s Merriweather Post Pavilion and Strawberry Jam, but in a manner consistent with Down There’s sound, are even subtler. The album picks up again during the second half of “Heather in the Hospital” and continues through closer and first single “Lucky 1.” “Lucky 1” is a walk beneath the el. Something that you pray is water drips down on you steadily, beneath the tracks. A familiar electronic buzz resounds; the album’s best percussion hisses and clinks, a far-off cymbal is struck. The sun has yet to rise and you worry for your wallet. This night is warmer than the last. A strange image of Brooklyn, Tare’s current place of residence, passes in the periphery, somewhat akin to Henry Miller’s idealized dystopian Brooklyn of Tropic of Capricorn. An organ pumps, suggesting the accordion of “Laughing Hieroglyphic” and a full circle is drawn out in the yellow fog that rises from street-side vents. You can almost see Avey Tare smile, as he grimaces, inquires, “Are you crying?”
Written by Josh Ginsberg

Halcyon Digest

After a disappointing 2009 EP, Rainwater Cassette Exchange, a release steeped in sixties pop posturing and a woefully apparent love of the Strokes, Deerhunter returns with the pleasant, pastoral—aw, fuck it—halcyon space-pop of Halcyon Digest. Halcyon Digest is held together by hazy motifs like reinvented memories, mystified as a result of front-man Bradford Cox’s demystifying effluences: statements issued to the press and blogosphere with clocklike regularity. What makes Halcyon Digest a good album is largely its cohesion. As evocative of Cox’s side project Atlas Sound’s Logos as it is of Microcastle, Halcyon Digest finds the healthy balance among the different touchstones that Cox has been, well, touching upon since Cryptograms in 2007.

The slow motion opener “Earthquake” seems to breathe: swelling with each intake of air to grandiose, sail-like proportions: efflorescing, slowly: chiller than chillwave… “Revival” would have been the best track on last year’s EP. Brief, beautifully textured garage rock, “Revival” offers the most top-knotch-Deerhunter per minute, by concentration.

The album’s best track comes just before the middle: secondary singer and guitarist Locket Pundt’s “Desire Lines.” With a vocal melody subtly lifted from the Strokes (actually, quite overtly—any subtlety stems only from the fact the stolen hook is from First Impressions of Earth, an album the indie-tastic community has seemingly forgotten), “Desire Lines” is Halcyon Digest’s most Microcastle-like song: a groovy, tumescent cousin to “Nothing Ever Happened,” with the album’s catchiest guitar work (a riff evocative of “Just Like Heaven” with a jolting, visceral crest) and swells, the top of its mix rendered cellophane.

The two best tracks on the album’s second half are spiritually akin. The elegiac “Helicopter” and “He Would Have Laughed” are culled of space-age harpsichords. The former tells the story of a Russian politician’s gay lover, who meets his death being thrown from a helicopter. The story is told in flashes. There is no narrative, only the God-fearing confusion of the murdered man, faced with the hideous and frightening realization that his welcome and that the love felt for him have been exhausted. The latter, recorded by Cox alone, an apparent farewell to nü-punk’s fallen angel, Jay Reatard and sounds more like Logos than anything else on the record.

Like Cryptograms before it, Halcyon Digest is more about mood than a consistent good time. Halcyon Digest has its lulls, but within the context of the listening experience they are less boring than—fuck it, I’ll say it again—halcyon. If calmness, a record that drifts, languishes, considers a time “when you were young and your excitement showed” that has passed bear any allure, check it out. Listen while driving, at day or night.

Written by Josh Ginsberg