10 of 2010 (#10): Deerhunter – Halcyon Digest

Halcyon Digest is about as descriptive a name as can be imagined for Deerhunter’s fourth album. Singer Bradford Cox further describes it as a response to how we edit or just downright invent our own pasts, consciously or otherwise. Not that Deerhunter were ever averse to a bit of nostalgia before. When their last album Microcastle leaked, the Atlanta four-piece released companion album Weird Era Cont in an attempt to instil a sense of anticipation for a new release in these jaded times. That album also, inevitably, leaked though that was no smear on Deerhunter themselves.

Halcyon Digest pushes things further, the band having asked fans to download, photocopy (how ambient punk!) and plaster their towns with DIY posters. Musically, it finds the band strategically stripped back. That sense of nostalgia, of a dream-like quality, may have been written into redundancy by now, but it’s hard to approach songs like Earthquake, Helicopter or sublime closer He Would Have Laughed without the kind of languid sense that comes from half-remembered childhood summer memories.

Meanwhile, the more upbeat numbers such as Desire Lines and Fountain Stairs have a more active sense of rifling through a gem-filled 70s record collection handed to you by a now-disinterested uncle, where new worlds and possibilities abound at your fingertips. Fittingly, it all ends unexpectedly, the splendid He Would Have Laughed (dedicated to the late Jay Reatard) unceremoniously cut mid-note at its most beautiful and ethereal moment. We’ve woken from the dream then, but with Halcyon Digest in our lives, we can always go back.