Deerhunter – Microcastle

Microcastle is one of those
albums it took me a while to figure out how to actually review, which
means it’s a good thing they gave us an absurd amount of lead time on
it, and I’ve had it to listen to all summer (this thing has seriously
been on my iPod for about the past two months or so).
Deerhunter’s last full-length, Cryptograms,
explored noise and ambient music in a pop context, largely pushing
the more pop tracks into the second LP. The vinyl edition came with
the next EP, Fluorescent Grey,
a largely pop affair, on the D-side, and they ran quite nicely into
each other.

Microcastle
picks up about where they left off and sort of comes back around full circle. After a short instrumental intro,
they’re in full-on pop song territory with “Agorophobia,” which
might be one of the most explicitly sexual indie rock songs ever
written. Blending a new wavey bass driven sound with sunny pop
melodies seems to be what this album (or, at least, its A-side; I’ll
explain this shortly) is all about. “Never Stop” takes the pop
element even farther, with a bigger guitar sound drenched in reverb
and feedbacking all over the place with everything building into an
ecstatic outro sort of reminiscent of The Arcade Fire, if they were
too stoned to be excited about much. “Little Kids” slows things
down a bit, drowns the vocals in reverb and lowers them in the mix,
and then proceeds to drown everything else out into a strange noisy
pop drone. The title track, “Microcastle,” seems like a strange
contrast to this, with its sparse arrangement and relatively
untouched (aside from a little reverb) vocal sound. It’s not until
the last minute or so the distortion kicks in and then the whole
thing abruptly grinds to a halt. “Calvary Scars” is more a
straight-up ambient thing that serves as a really nice lead-in to the
Sigur Rós-styled piano
of “Green Jacket,” a song that is almost staggering in both its
sparse expansiveness and its brevity. The last third of this sandwich
is “Activa,” which brings to mind the “swamp of noise”
(because it sounds to me like someone writing songs around a bunch of
sounds they recorded at some sketchy looking house in a swamp
somewhere) sound of their last album. I get the feeling these tracks
are probably intended to make the listener sort of uncomfortable in
preparation for the album’s first single, “Nothing Ever Happened”
bringing the band back into full on pop song territory. This track is
about as straight-up “indie rock” as these guys get. It reminds
me a little bit of Yo La Tengo with its extended, sort of “jammy”
instrumental outro, which takes up about half the time devoted to the
song. “Saved by Old Times” is written around a bluesy guitar line
and the actual song gives way to goofy samples of people yelling at
each other incoherently played forward and backwards. I’m not sure
how I feel about that, but the song itself is great and turns into a
weird ambient post-punk thing at the end. The next track, “Neither
of Us, Uncertainly,” is more an ambient thing with lots of reverb
and a nice hypnotic melody. The outro leads into “Twilight at
Carbon Lake,” which sort of reminds me of Built to Spill with its
expansive sound and melancholy pop vocal melody, as well as its use
of guitar interplay. Even Bradford Cox sort of channels Doug Martsch
with his vocal style on this one. The biggest difference is that
where Built to Spill would turn the song into an epic jam session,
Deerhunter drowns it, bludgeons it, and destroys it with layers upon
layer of guitars and feedback with equally majestic results.

So
basically, this album is good. I like it about as much as I liked
Cryptograms, but for
different reasons. The last album was more about ambient strangeness.
This album is pretty much the closest thing to a pop album they’ve
written so far. It’s really good and I recommend it highly.

These guys are
headed out on tour with Times New Viking (who are also awesome in their own way). More info can be found at
the band’s MySpace page, and also at the blog where Bradford Cox
posts a lot of song downloads, mostly for his other band, Atlas
Sound.