Adam Knott
Writer, music lover, marketer.
By Volume | Album Reviews & Uninterrupted Music Discussion. Deerhunter - Monomania | review | By Volume. Deerhunter’s true essence – pop forms disintegrating into chaos – is uncorked in the first five seconds of “Neon Junkyard.” A chiming, Byrdsian guitar riff is cleft in two by Bradford Cox’s low, throat-gurgling croak, sputtered like the last breath of a dying man. This beauty-found-in-destruction aesthetic is littered all throughout the band’s prolific catalog; chord progressions imploded by crushing feedback, diaphanous arpeggios sopping with reverb, and elegant melodic figures repeated, elongated and deformed until they’re recast in grotesque, drone rock shapes.
In many ways, these sounds are extensions of their creator, an eloquent, gloriously talented soul who remains trapped in a misshapen body; Cox suffers from Marfan Syndrome, a genetic disorder that results in unusually long, skeletal limbs, severe cardiovascular complications, and a shortened life expectancy. Monomania‘s careful sequencing accentuates its stark, almost bi-polar shifts in mood and recording style. Music is Math | feature | By Volume. These past two weeks have been my first living alongside Boards of Canada. No longer the control to an experiment that happened ten odd years ago, I watched them rise again, and until today’s announcement that they would indeed be releasing a new album, I was part of the “action” it meditated: Sitting at my computer watching and waiting, looking for fans to decode the numbers that exist in this unfinished, counter-binary system, and speculating on what it meant for a band to be so brazenly vague and yet so specific at the same time.
Since the Record Store Day fake-out (oh sure, there were records, but I experienced the news as a digital phenomenon), fans have been graced with snippets of a numbered code and TV advert hype, both formats feeding us information that has to be listened to. A classic Boards of Canada move if ever there was one; even if I have to write the numbers down and router them into a larger system, I’m still hearing them read out as if my life exists in the sounds. Peer to Peer Lending. Professional Translation. Translate English to Spanish. Translate English to French. Translate English to German.
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