Day 0991 - Halcyon Digest

Deerhunter “Halcyon Digest” (2010)

The band were originally formed by vocalist Bradford Cox and Moses Achuleta.   Cox let someone else choose the band name as he figured the band was a short-term ‘art project’ and went on to state that he disliked the name.

The group’s bass player died in an accident and this added to the difficulties of making their first album, which was given the confrontational title "Turn it up Faggot".   The band were convinced after this to carry on recording albums and this is their fifth.   Lyrically it deals with people rewriting their memories to present the picture of their life they want to remember.

To me lots of this sounds like what I might expect it to sound like if John Lennon were alive and put in charge of a modern indie-rock band.   The gentle, stripped down "Sailing" in particular is very Lennon-esque both in the compositional style and the dreamy yet slightly cutting cadence of the singer's voice.    Lennon's love of sonic experimentation is also shared by the band with the opening track "Earthquake" is a swirl of psychedelic guitar parts over a looped percussion track that seems to mix drums with a hint of other non-musical sounds.

The drum beats are often fairly repetitive and straightforward almost like loops, though on songs like “Desire Lines” and “He Would Have Laughed” the loops are sometimes repeating over 4 bars rather than one or two, so pleasingly more engaging than they necessarily need to be.

The songs often use walls of trippy sounds, but there are some more quite nice simple tracks amongst that, like the aforementioned "Sailing" and "Basement Scene".   "Helicopter" again goes over a treated beat building simple quite folky guitar parts which swell to meet the choruses.

There are a couple of rockier tracks leading up to the finish, including "Fountain Stairs" which almost has a touch of the Dunedin Sound to it.    The last track "He Would Have Laughed" has a groove to it that's somehow busy and laidback at the same time.   Feels like Lennon mixed with a bit of Animal Collective.