I don't generally buy albums on or around their day of their release nowadays. Hey, we're all getting on. But something about Deerhunter's recent activity had piqued my interest and convinced me that this was worth owning so I dutifully trooped my way down to my local record store yesterday morning. It had come out the previous day.
I was right. It's a bit of an event. A record on 4AD, the most graceful of all record labels, with a cut out sleeve featuring a glossy shot of the ocean. An album that will doubtless feature high on the end of year polls that are probably in the process of being written as we speak. Christmas comes earlier every year. There definitely sounds like there's something going on here that's worthy of attention.
It's a pop album though not of the standard sort and a shimmering one. Whereas previous Deerhunter records have been much more conventionally underpinned by guitars, this one seems awash with a queasy synth sound that maintains its buoyancy throughout. It's not long, less than forty minutes, it comes and say its thing and then its gone and you're pretty tempted to just turn it over to the first side and listen to it again. As I'm in the process of reviewing it that's what I'll do.
It's a musing on mortality, the quite incredible fact that we're alive which we're inevitably confronted with every day from the moment we wake to the moment we retire to bed again. In some ways it sounds middle aged, which suits me, as that's what I am, but lead singer and clearly guiding star of the album, Bradford Cox is only thirty three. But he's just experienced a near death experience having survived being run over a while back which has clearly led him to confront the awkward fact of his own existence. And then confront it again. In fact again and again for the course of the whole album. It's that dreaded thing. A concept record.
'I'm living my life. I'm living my life...' he intones repeatedly in the album's second track, not coincidentally entitled Living My Life. 'Will you tell me when you find out. How to conquer all this fear,' 'The amber waves of grain. Are turning grey again.' There are Deerhunter, caught in the enormous eternity of an American landscape, (this last quote is lifted from the great patriotic poem 'America the Beautiful'), making their seventh studio album, certainly middle aged in band terms. And not quite happy with the state of things.
Fading Frontier is a constant musing on mortality. A record between life and death and a slightly disquieting album to listen to as a result, 'Between the stars that are slowly dying,' 'wave bye bye,' and so on. Snippets of lyrics jump out at you as it spins its merry way onwards.It seems like it's a conscious attempt at a big artistic statement and Cox has pared his writing style down to the very basics in order to make it.
Not all of it is available on YouTube yet. But the three songs I've posted here give a fairly good impression of what it's about. Cox has elsewhere written an influence map of things that inspired its gestation and while he picks plenty of leftfield and plain odd selections, Pharoah Sanders and Japanese ceramics and so on, INXS and Tom Petty are also listed there.
It's apparent why they are although Final Frontier is not going to rush and make me listen to Need You Tonight. But the album is awash with what sound to me like eighties production values. I was reminded of Psychedelic Furs and their big glossy pop record Mirror Moves at points. On Snakeskin, just into the second side Iggy Pop and David Bowie are the more immediate touchstones and we find ourselves in the mid seventies rather than that later decade. It's an incredible funk moment and it's probably only Cox's resolutely ungainly presence in the promo video that will prevent it from being the huge commercial breakthrough moment for the band it clearly should be.
Elsewhere, the record is full of electronic noise, like static on the line, which reminds the listener that we are in fact in 2015 and all of these moments obscure and otherwise of pop history are just that. Becoming ancient memories at that. Thirty years and counting. As Rock and Roll becomes older and older still it will have to take stranger journeys to recover and maintain its vitality. Deerhunter are embarked on their own and they're doing a great job of it and setting a fine example that very few are following. Make a point of hearing this record.
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