He Would Have Laughed – Deerhunter (Free Download)
Rarely does an album make you react so strongly that you’re hard pressed to find a starting point in describing it. Halcyon Digest by Deerhunter is such an album. The native Georgians have delivered a near-revolutionary record that spirals generations of rock-n-roll, meshing them into one clear vision.What makes Bradford Cox better than the rest is his ability to translate the simplest of ideas into an elaborate record. We began to see him take that to a whole new level during his 2009 solo work as Atlas Sound. Halcyon Digest offers so much to dissect, but this album is more than a sum of its parts.
The record starts out with a powerful track, “Earthquake”. It serves as a really good primer for the rest of the album, which at the core, is all about orchestrating electronic sounds into a really optimistic sounding harmony. The album creates this feeling of rebirth through the track “Memory Boy”. After that, it seems to take a slightly different identity, as if the band is exploring the past. “Fountain Lines”, bridges the two styles with a track that not-coincidentally sounds like Stereolab (Cox and fellow band member Lockett Pundt are admittedly big fans of the Brit rockers).
“Basement Scene” is a track that Cox delivered a strong effort on with lead vocals and the beginning sounds very reminiscent of The Everly Brothers’ 1959 hit, “Dream”. It feels like a coming-of-age track that takes you through time in its own way. That’s followed up by “Helicopter”, the album’s second single and arguably the most beautiful song to be released in a long time. “Coronado” is another favorite of mine, which gives you this feeling of a vintage, classic sound that would be playing during the innocent days of decades past. Halcyon Digest concludes with a 7-minute track titled “He Would Have Laughed”. It serves as dedication and a preservation of the memory of the late Jay Reatard, who passed away this winter. Perhaps by design, it’s the most precise and detailed track while simultaneously being the most lyrically deep.
The more the album plays and the deeper it gets, the more you want to listen and the more it grips you. The saxophone even makes an appearance in the second half of the album, because Cox thought “saxophones are becoming this thing. Next year everyone’s gonna have a saxophone on their record because saxophones are just cool.” It was a sound inspired by Cox’s listening of the Rolling Stones’ reissue of Exile On Main Street. This record leaves me with image of a strong tornado sweeping up a small, poor Midwestern town and as the town is being decimated by this forceful storm, the debris that’s left in its wake forms a new and improved town, a very glass is half-full kind of feeling.
