Halcyon Digest

The latest release from Deerhunter, the indie rock/punk crowdpleasers who brought us modern art-rock classics like "Cryptograms" and "Microcastle." Pretty much everybody and their mother (and Pitchfork) loves ‘em, and it’s easy to tell why. This collection of songs represents their poppiest works to date, but it definitely has that signature gritty atmosphere that’s worth losing drool over. Excellent songcraft and snarky cynical lyrics about abstract concepts and deep suppressed anxiety. This album is so stacked with good songs that it’s not even funny. Every music publication worth their weight in pus will have this in their yearly top-ten list.

ALL TRACKS ARE FCC CLEAN. TRY: 5, 8, 3, 10, 2, 11

RIYL: The Replacements, Smashing Pumpkins, Spoon, Jay Reatard if he had gone to RISD, the United States 1992 Olympic men's basketball team.

1.An ambient psych landscape with heavily distorted lyrics. Sunny and warm with slow-motion drums and backwards guitar samples.
2.Fuzz guitars and echoed lyrics. Catchy.
3.Strummy and stringy with ukulele and acoustic guitar. Harsh electric riffs and snarled lyrics. One of my favorite tracks of this young decade.
4.A slow and delicate ballad with gentle stabs of guitar. Trudging, and with an overwhelming sense of anxiety.
5.A bright and sunny rocker. Lots of shoegazer elements. Epic church bells, blazing guitars and varied percussion. An instant keeper.
6.A midtempo epic rocker. (Think Broken Social Scene) A bit smoother and more lush than the rest of the album.
7.Slow, and deliberate with reverb, and echoes. Dark with lyrics about death, aging.
8.Heavily-promoted single. A midtempo rocker with ethereal sparkly sound effects, and a slowly building crescendo of fuzz noise. A beautiful reflection on mortality and the human condition.
9.Lou Reed style vocals with minimal but LOUD drums, and simple but effective guitar chords.
10.A frantic art-rocker with killer saxophone parts (but not in an annoying junior high ska band style…don’t worry). They somehow make it work.
11.Gorgeous strummy acoustic song with African percussion recorded as a tribute to Jay Reatard.