Send "Deerhunter " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 Deerhunter toured with Nine Inch Nails this summer, making a stop at Colorado's famed Red Rocks Amphitheatre. That canyon found the Atlanta noise-rock quintet at a precipice. In the few months prior, Deerhunter had added a new guitarist, Whitney Petty, to replace the departed Colin Mee. Lead singer Bradford Cox had released his debut solo album, Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel, under the name Atlas Sound. The band's third album, Microcastle, and its would-be surprise bonus disc, Weird Era Cont., had both leaked half a year before they were due in stores. Unimpressed NIN fans were writing blog posts comparing Cox to Geddy Lee.Like Trent Reznor, Cox is a classic outcast. But the real question is why Deerhunter aren't opening for Radiohead, as their friends in Liars and Grizzly Bear have done. Admirers and detractors of Deerhunter's 2007 breakout album, Cryptograms, all seemed to agree on one thing: Despite its status as an underground hit, it didn't explore totally new sounds. Radiohead didn't invent krautrock or avant-garde electronic music, either-- let alone UK post-punk, American alt-rock, or the Beatles. Instead, what they've done is use a stunning assortment of shrewd instrumental ideas to express contemporary anxiety and alienation, all in the form of pop songs, on albums conceived to be more than the sum of their parts. Deerhunter don't sound a lot like Radiohead, but they've absorbed the UK rock icons' outlook as fully as anybody. If Cryptograms holds any "encoded message," I argued in a Pitchfork review, it's this: Deerhunter are a pop band. Microcastle/Weird Era Cont. proves me half-right. It sidesteps much of the art-damaged squall of previous Deerhunter records, but it doesn't embrace 1950s and 60s pop as intensely as lead singer Bradford Cox had intimated in early interviews. If Cryptograms brutalized the pop ideal like a guitar-wielding David Lynch, leaving the follow-up Fluorescent Grey EP an exquisite corpse, then Microcastle resurrects it, scar tissue and all. The resulting 2xCD set captures urgent and imaginative songs that reorganize 4AD haze, off-kilter indie pop, crashing garage-punk, forward-leaning krautrock, and hypnotic Kranky ambience into a singular-sounding call-to-arms....full text |
| Guardian |
| Fresh on the heels of his deliciously spooky Atlas Sound solo album, the bizarre and beguiling Bradford Cox outdid himself again on his Brooklyn-based band's third record. Like many of their peers, Deerhunter are enamoured of shoegazing. Unlike most, they swim with the genre's morbid undertow, pitching their seductive noisescapes not as a means of transcendence but as an asphyxiating yet beautiful cocoon. "I want only to see four walls made of concrete," sighs guitarist Lockett Pundt on Agoraphobia. Microcastle's counterintuitive sequencing turns out to be a coup as the band pass through Sonic Youth/Galaxie 500 noise-pop, lose themselves in a wintry ambient blur, and emerge, emboldened, with Nothing Ever Happened's astonishing motorik wig-out, one of the finest songs of the year. The more experimental bonus disc offers yet more evidence that this remarkable band are just getting started....full text |
| Tinymixtapes |
| Let’s be honest: was there really anybody who was waiting with baited breath for Deerhunter’s third full-length, Microcastle? Discounting the antagonistic one-two punch of last year’s Cryptograms and the Fluorescent Grey EP, we’ve received, in the last year and change, the frostily sexual debut from Bradford Cox’s Atlas Sound side project and enough demos, mix tapes, and EPs posted to the band’s blog that could easily fill a double-disc set (if not more). It can be hard to get excited about new releases from overwhelmingly prolific bands, no matter how consistently strong the material is. Of course, being the stubborn, complex individuals that they are, Deerhunter have regardless delivered a true and instant stunner with Microcastle; its sonic debts may run deep to the dual sexual ambiguity and epic bliss of shoegaze and ’50s pop, but the record’s blood is warm with both nostalgia and originality. Whereas Cryptograms’ closer, “Heatherwood,” acted as the meditative comedown to a spectacularly angst-ridden trip, Microcastle opens with the giant sighs of “Cover Me (Slowly)” — big, post-climax chords that brim with passive ecstasy and act as a celestial bridge between the two albums. Then, as the metronomic melody of “Agoraphobia” and “Never Stops” briskly passes by, the mood starts getting a little hazy as static skies hang over the final minutes of “Little Kids.” A pensive meditation occurs and anger arises as the record reveals itself as Cryptograms in reverse: a deluge of post-traumatic relief that slowly mutates into a snapshot of noisy sexual and personal frustration found in the whirlwind guitars of “Neither of Us, Uncertainly” and the towering crash of the finale of album closer “Twilight at Carbon Lake”....full text |
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