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
