atlas sound/sacred space

You can say what you want about Pitchfork, but they've got that whole "end of the year" thing down to a science and their off-shoot for music videos, Pitchfork TV, continues to showcase new ways for fans to approach their favourite artists. One of their best features, "Cemetery Gates," places musicians in the empty sanctuary of a gothic cathedral. For the well-behaved choir boys like Grizzly Bear and Jonsi it seems like a perfect fit, while bands like Of Montreal are forced to rethink their over the top stage presence. The video below finds Deerhunter's Bradford Cox performing material from Atlas Sound's 2009 release, Logos. One of the best songs on the album, "Attic Lights" sounds like it was meant to be played in this sort of context and it's all the better for it.

saxophones are finally cool again

Although I regularly enjoy paging through Exclaim, Canada's monthly music rag, it's rare that I'll actually read anything in it. This month I had to make an exception and it paid off. The October issue features a substantial interview with Deerhunter frontman Bradford Cox. There are a number of particularly great moments and I can't resist posting a few of them here.

On the timeliness of his releases:

Every fall I want to put out a record because I like listening to records in the fall . . . I remember in high school and college, when records came out in the fall and I was really interested in checking them out. If someone in the band was having a baby or something [Halcyon Digest] would have been an Atlas Sound album, though I would have approached it a bit differently. The difference between Deerhunter and Atlas Sound has more to do with scheduling than anything else. There are songs that are just Atlas Sound songs and there are songs that are just Deerhunter songs, but Logos could have been a Deerhunter album. If I had to say this album was most like anything I'd say Weird Era Cont.

On the rising prominence of the saxophone in indie music:

I wanted that sax on there because I was listening to the Stones' Exile On Main Street reissue a lot . . . I began to see a pattern forming. Saxophones are becoming this thing. That's why we did it early. Next year everyone's gonna have a saxophone on their record because saxophones are just cool. This is gonna sound random and cutesy, but I've always had this fantasy of having a dog named Saxophone. Saxophone is one of my favourite words.

I can't help agreeing with Cox's point about the saxophone (all of TV on the Radio's albums are fine examples of this; and then, of course, there's Menomena), but I think it's growing popularity also has something to do with the fact that everyone's (finally!) re-embracing the early nineties. For me, this is a cause for celebration; indeed, it's not difficult to see why I'm such a fan of Deerhunter. The song Cox is referrencing (from Deerhunter's new album, Halcyon Digest), "Coronado," features a totally gratuitous sax solo that could have been lifted from just about any 90s sit-com (see below). Awesome.

 

on youth and youngmanhood

I'm sorry to bump U2 from the top of my webpage, but it had to happen at some point. Huge egos are in no short supply. Don Draper, recently named the most iconic man in America (ahead of Obama!), knows how to where a tie - so well, in fact, that he's always tangled up in an affair of some sort, whether it's a businessman looking for a new image for his company, or a girl who can resist his uber-macho charm. Are we really that shallow? I think so.

Don Draper may be a fictional character on AMC's Mad Men, but he's just as real as any other public personality you can think of. Celebrities are brands, with carefully constructed images, and most of us are just as likely to have a beer with Don Draper as with anybody else on this list. What matters is that Draper's hardass 1960s persona represents something about male identity that is enduringly captivating but has nonetheless vanished. The man that Don Draper is -- value-driven and thoroughly masculine -- is the product of a bygone era; without him, there would be no contemporary figure to represent it. Yet, as removed as his persona may be, it is also contemporary and familiar. He's a postwar archetype, both a brilliant career man and a temptation-swayed philanderer who sincerely wants to be a family man. Like most men, us and our fathers both, Draper is permanently conflicted over how to reconcile his morals and his desires.

This from a website that asks their male visitors (creepy) to rate male and female celebrities out of a hundred. I remember when jocks used to do that in high school. No wonder us guys identify with Mr. Draper.

+ + +

There are three tracks of sublime pop on the new Atlas Sound record (which comes out tomorrow! and is awesome!). "Sheila" is a catchy, guitar driven anthem about love and death, while the album's heady centrepiece, "Quick Canal," features layered vocal stylings by Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadler. Arguably the weakest of these three, the attention-grabbing "Walkabout," voices the mid-midlife crisis for those of us into our twenties: "what did you want to be when you grew up?" Does growing older have to be a disappointment? The movie everyone is talking about right now (and when I say "everyone" I mean hipster twentysomethings and the websites they visit) is Spike Jones' adaptation of Maurice Sendeck's Where the Wild Things Are. I still haven't seen it but from what I've heard its sounds like its going to appeal to those of us who want our childhood back; those of us who still feel like kids that have been prematurely catapulted into an adult culture of glossy disappointments. I can hear Arcade Fire playing, I can see the "wild" celebration ("inside all of us"), and I'll admit that it makes me nostalgic (even though Karen O and the Kids, who provide the film's soundtrack, really piss me off). It's supposed to, isn't it? Nostalgia allows you get away with anything. It's all right there in Mad Men.

that old time religion

There's a slew of albums coming out this year are clothed in unmistakably religious symbolism and I'm not quite sure how to take it. Following last year's Heretic Pride (a shout out to Prostestants? Anabaptists?) and their Satanic Messiah EP (I guess not), the Mountain Goats have recently revealed their new album, Life of the World to Come, set to come out later this summer. I'm starting to see a progression here and frankly, the concepts behind this new release sound a lot more interesting than last year's admirable but heavy-handed records. What are the Mountain Goats doing reading the Bible? Life's first single, "Genesis 3:23," is a finely tuned folk ballad with a chorus that, quite appropriately repeats the line "I used to live here." Each track is named after a different verse from the Bible and will, I expect, feature the same sort of bittersweetness. I'm interested to see how ambiguous they allow this album to be (which should correlate to its overall quality). My hope is that it will be something comparable in tone to last year's City of Refuge by the Castanets.

Another, perhaps less suprising release is the new album by Om, entitled God is Good, which follows 2007's Pilgrimage. Now I'm aware that a lot of black metal subverts religious concepts, but it seems like Om is going another route (or maybe I'm just really naive) - either they're making an attempt to parody and ultimately subvert religious imagery, or perhaps their interest is an aesthetic one? Are they following Sun 0)))'s devastating Monoliths and Dimensions, a very strong candidate for 2009's best album, whose album centrepiece "Big Church" fuses a macabre metal with droning walls of sound? It's an album about death and the void; and what better entry point than that hollowed-out ghost-town called religious tradition?

One of my most anticipated albums of the year, Atlas Sound's Logos, sees Bradford Cox returning to the kind of spiritual concepts that have infused Deerhunter's best material. The Flourescent Grey EP, whose title track seems to me like a meditation on Christ's flesh (attentive to the strangeness or humanness of the "logos"), is probably the best example of this bizarre interest in transcendence - which is ultimately what Deerhunter's sound is all about. Logos sounds like it could be another winner. If you haven't heard the first single, "Walkabout" featuring Panda Bear (!), I suggest you do so RIGHT NOW! Cox has alwayts taken himself way too seriously, but calling his new album Logos takes the cake. Seriously, would anyone have had the gall to use that title ten years ago? Is this evidence of an increasing secularization (where religious ideas are put into service of a higher aesthetic or artistic truth), or are people realizing that there's something worthwhile about revisiting religious traditions. Perhaps we haven't left them behind after all. Perhaps we can't.