Send "Atlas Sound " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 Bradford Cox knows a thing or two about creating a schism between his everyday self and the one he presents on record. In interviews he's garrulous and outspoken, ostensibly brimming with confidence, yet plagued by insecurity. All that self-doubt manifests itself in his solo project, Atlas Sound, where he often sounds small, alone, and cut adrift from the world. At times Cox seems at odds with himself, but dig deeper and there's usually a thread running through his real-world activities and the ideas he obsesses over when recording.And he's always recording. Last year, Cox released four albums of Atlas Sound demos as the free-download Bedroom Databank series. It's a wonder he can keep track of all his work, but one of his biggest talents-- aside from his rich vein of form as a songwriter-- is as an editor. Not only does he know exactly what to release officially and what to preserve as a blog-only treat for fans, he's also intuitively adept at compartmentalizing material into his Deerhunter and Atlas Sound worlds. Despite the separation, those two modes aren't mutually exclusive, and it's always interesting to see how Cox's two guises feed off each other while retaining strong individual identities. The last Deerhunter album, Halcyon Digest, ended with "He Would Have Laughed", built around a spaghetti-like loop of synthesized noise. It mirrors a trick that's revisited just a few songs into Parallax, on "Te Amo". Here, Cox leans on a repeating pattern, then pulls away from it by testing the elasticity of his vocal range, stretching into a gruff register he's rarely tried out before. Atlas Sound often functions this way, taking baby steps on the road to evolution and leaving traces of previous material to ground the listener. The two constants are Cox's fascination with ambient music and the unabashed sadness at the heart of his writing. "When you're down, you're always down," he croons on "Te Amo"....full text |
| Prettymuchamazing |
| Parallax is a displacement in the apparent position of an object viewed along two different lines of sight. Bradford Cox’s third album as Atlas Sound (a musical moniker he’s used since he was ten) is all about this type of cosmic perspective. If you follow just one of the acoustic boundaries laid before you, there’s no telling how far it will take you down the rabbit hole. Any wave of modulated sound will either go on for eternity or come to a digital halt. These are some rather risky games to play with the listener on what is essentially a contemporary pop album. Fortunately we’re rewarded with a harrowing sonic adventure that retains all the expected stark undertones with a greater penchant for incredibly lucid stream-of-consciousness. If we hopped in a time machine and set the flux capacitor for 1992, there’s a very good chance this album would be packaged and sold as a dual-disc compilation. Half of the album consists of major key acoustic ballads, delicately laced with that spooky cool veneer. At the other end of the spectrum are more plaintive but equally impressive minor key tracks that push the envelope in more subtle fashion. A good opener for the imaginary first disc (titled Viewpoint Alpha of course) would be “The Shakes”, a playful off-key mid-tempo brooder that borders on that thin line between malaise and sudden realization, fades back into obscurity, until it boils to a frenzied coda. “Te Amo” is another teeming Petri dish of cascading arpeggio employing high fidelity piano tracks, firing synthesized synapses and Cox’s best Thom Yorke impersonation. The Jayhawks or Spoon would be bobbing their respective heads to “Mona Lisa” which is by far the most fleshed out traditionally structured acoustic pop song Cox has released as his alter ego....full text |
| Slantmagazine |
| When I was a kid, I would alternate covering up one of my eyes and note the difference in perspective when viewing some random household object. It was often frightening how wildly different the right and left eye took in a book, a table, or the pet dog. This, apparently, is a parallax: the measurement between two sightlines perceiving the same object. Atlas Sound's new album is thus appropriately named, as it pushes a capricious frame of reference amid a constantly changing sonic landscape. With Parallax, Bradford Cox has crafted the ultimate driving album for a night in the American Southwest: dusty, deserted, and cold, but full of quirky, colorful flourishes, rich without ever feeling overstuffed, and quietly reflective in ways that eschew heavyhanded pensiveness. The album, however, isn't quite the leftfield diversion one would expect to follow on the heels of the Panda Bear-esque Logos. Typically, Atlas Sound has existed as a form of mad-scientist escapism for Cox, a sandbox-meets-laboratory venture where he's free to pursue the dreamy promises of Deerhunter's music to their natural, experimental ends. Compare "Walkabout," his collaboration with Animal Collective's Noah Lennox, to Deerhunter's "Helicopter": Both are bubbling, atmospheric pieces from a semi-brooding romantic, but while the former is unpredictable and amorphous, reveling in alt-folk noise, the latter can't quite escape the rigid pop-song limitations underneath all of its ancillary clicking and whirring. Parallax is more closely aligned with the structured sound of Deerhunter, and often plays like a disjointed, ambient footnote to Halcyon Digest. Yet the fact that Parallax is no great departure from Deerhunter's ouevre does little to dampen its gorgeous vision. As tracks like the warbling "Doldrums" prove, Cox has a talent for crafting slow-burning, loosely assembled masterpieces, his music drifting skillfully beneath his breathy, unguarded musings. A rugged twang characterizes songs like "My Angel Is Broken" and "Te Amo," the latter a countrified harpischord fantasy that cements Parallax as the ideal soundtrack to a lonely, psych-folk excursion into the desert. It wouldn't be surprising, in fact, to hear any of Parallax's 12 songs, particularly the disquieting "Flagstaff," accompanying the surreal depiction of amateur meth trafficking in sunny, saturated Albequerque that Breaking Bad so effectively portrays....full text |
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