Review: Deerhunter @ Emo’s 12.2
With Deerhunter, we have a band that takes their name from an impressive war film of the 70′s, but their music has more to do with unnerving Russian roulette scene that seared itself into our collective conscious, than it does the entire film. With every song, Bradford Cox has transformed himself into Christopher Walken’s character and is spinning the barrel of his existential revolver, squeezing the trigger, smiling at his luck, and inviting us to try.
From the onset, we were met with oscillating fuzz and feedback loops that felt more like creatures from the ether swooping down on Emo’s and perching on the rafters as onlookers. Cryptograms kicks in and Cox’s voice swoons over the microphone with a ghostly reverb, the drawbridge extends itself over the hazardous moat, and we are in Deerhunter’s eerie Microcastle.
The Atlanta quintet drew from all of their recorded material to date and followed their intro with the propulsive Never Stops. Josh Fauver and Moses Archuleta held down the fort with a steady-punch bassline and a compelling kick drum, which then gave way to the epic, metal-wind chorus, as the band locked in to drive the song’s message home. It was made clear early, we were witnessing something special, something unaware of its own end.
As they intently moved through their discography, an insight began to dawn on me. The crew’s music functioned more like an incantation, the space we occupied felt more like a meeting ground for the living and the dead, and I was never more comfortable with my own mortality. There was a strange reassurance looming in the air comprised of banshee wail and Deerhunter music. Gone was the contrived head-bob and inappropriate mosh-pit, in it’s place, a committed engagement by a mesmerized audience. This was a full-blown trance, and despite my talkative friend’s wishes that “everyone should be jammin’ out,” I concluded the only thing jammed was her noodle and it prevented her from receiving transmissions from this ghost frequency. I was tired of Cox having all the fun, so I took the gun, spun the barrel, pulled the trigger, got lucky, and smiled back.
By the time they reached Nothing Ever Happened, a song that could make a serious run for song of the year in the underground circuit, I couldn’t imagine anything going wrong for these ATLiens. Nothing boasted it’s undulating hiss, exclamatory bass, Whitney Petty’s infectious lick, the tandem shimmer of Lockett Pundt and Petty’s guitars, Cox’s math-rock guitar trickery a la Van Halen, a climax culminating into a pitch-bending audio assault, and a challenge to one’s musical palate and sanity. What a great place to be!
Deerhunter’s last half of the set bounced around from new to old, to mistakenly-leaked, and back to new. At one bookend there was the grimy dance-pop of Weird Era release Operation, and at the other Twilight at Carbon Lake, a modern-day version of Santo and Johnny’s Sleepwalk. Everything in between confirmed a peculiar feeling. Although every member of Deerhunter is an integral part of its anthem(ic) sound, it’s Bradford Cox that appears to be in two realms at once, in the here and now and the hereafter, a beacon transmitting messages from a frequency which we should all hope to be attuned to. He possesses a musical soul that extends itself from the beginning of Rock’s musings to places Rock music has yet to go. At Carbon Lake’s thunderous, crescendo into tremulous, guitar fury, abrasive shrill, and percussive cacophony, I was relieved to find that we all survived this daring game of sonic Russian roulette and comforted by this thought. Once in blue moon, we encounter a band that reaches conceptual bliss, and Deerhunter is that band.
