Send "Deerhunter " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 Halcyon Digest is a record about the joy of music discovery, the thrill of listening for the first time to a potential future favorite, and that sense of boundless possibility when you're still innocent of indie-mainstream politics and your personal canon is far from set. In revisiting that youthful enthusiasm, Deerhunter brilliantly rekindle it, and the result meets Microcastle/Weird Era (Con't) as the band's most exhilarating work to date. Whether those halcyon days were real or just idealized doesn't matter. With producer Ben Allen, who lent a bass-heavy sheen to Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion, these four guys-- lead singer Bradford Cox, singer/guitarist Lockett Pundt, bass player Josh Fauver, and drummer Moses Archuleta-- have created a seamless album of startling emotional clarity.Deerhunter have never lacked ambition. 2007 breakout Cryptograms came as two discrete halves: one front-loaded with ambient drifts and clanging post-punk aggression, the other blasting off into sunny psych-pop. Microcastle turned out to be a sprawling, ghostly amusement park of a double album, with violence and frail beauty never far from each other. And then there are all those EPs, side projects, and rarities. In blog posts and interviews, Cox has shown himself to be a music lover of the highest order, almost a platonic ideal of the artist as fan. This record marks a distinctly different approach for the band, more streamlined and stripped down, and in its sparest moments, it echoes the stark intimacy and one-take effortlessness of records like Neil Young's Tonight's the Night or Chris Bell's I Am the Cosmos. Fans of the band's earlier stuff may understandably miss some of the old electric-guitar squall, but Halcyon Digest's expanded instrumental palette-- acoustic guitar, electronic percussion, banjo, autoharp, harmonica, vocal harmonies, and saxophone (!)-- creates endless depths of intricacy and nuance to explore in headphones....full text |
| Guardian |
| For all that Deerhunter is often perceived as "Bradford Cox's band", it's a measure of strength in depth that the standout on their fourth album is written by guitarist Lockett Pundt. Desire Lines is built around the tension between a plucked guitar line that falls as the riff below it rises, before unwinding into a soaring and shimmering chorus, and concluding with a near four-minute coda that ploughs on and on and on. It's beautiful and grand, as entrancing a piece of neo-psychedelia as you might wish for. Cox's contributions are none too shabby, either. Revival is sturdy garage pop, lifted into something lovely by imaginative percussion, and what sounds like a mandolin beneath the fuzz. Deerhunter aren't just revivalists, though: in the main this is timeless music, seemingly made with the conviction that loveliness will always be lovely. And on the seven-minute closer, He Would Have Laughed, the combination of effects, melody, harmonies and instrumentation results in a song that manages to look forwards and backwards simultaneously....full text |
| Hmv |
| Sep 2010 Deerhunter return with their fourth LP, 'Halcyon Digest'. Ubiquitous frontman Bradford Cox describes "...always being fascinated with the ephemera of 70's – 80's artrock in record stores like Wuxtry in Athens where I hung out as a kid or Wax 'N Facts in Atlanta. You'd see a photocopied faded B-52's flyer next to a poster for Lou Reed or XTC. It was like an artpunk scrapbook on those walls. It made my head spin. Who are these people? Who are the fucking Residents with these weird-ass eyeball faces?"...full text |
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