AWmusic

It was premiered live in April, leaked onto the internet in May and a MediaShare folder was pillaged for the bonus Weird Era Cont. disc (due to be released with Microcastle as a release date surprise) in August. Now it’s been made available on i-Tunes, before the official, old-fashioned album launch on October the 28th. Whether you prefer your albums in your hand, as type on an electronic device or even just on a CD shelf looking pretty with all the others, you should really just be listening to Microcastle with whatever contraption you normally use to get music into your ears.
Deerhunter’s third album is appropriately divided into three different four-song sections. The beginning portion begins with the reverb saturated waves of “Cover Me Slowly” an intro and companion piece to the following, “Agoraphobia”, a paean to the comfort of enclosed spaces. Feedback effects howl like bitter winter winds on “Never Stops” a song aptly addressing winter despair and “Little Kids” with Bradford Cox’s lyrical mortality mantra, “To get older, still” is carried as a repeated refrain until the instruments behind the voice reach critical mass and the re-statement becomes a recurring reminder of decline set to a chiming guitar zenith.
The middle section, a blended four-song suite, slows the tempo down to a meditative pace. Built around the masterful “Calvary Scars” this segment furnishes the album with a halfway breather before the last third opens and the guitars build momentum again with the motorik/krautrock final of “Nothing Ever Happened” and the circular Byrdsian jangle of “Saved By Old Times”.
With layers of now crystalline guitars and vocal harmonising it’s clear that Deerhunter are working with a cleaner sonic palette and a focussed pop sensibility. Gone is the distorted ambience and the blissed out drone rock that divided the previous album, Cryptograms, into two (rather than Microcastle’s three) and on this record, the fusion of riotous guitar noise is contained within compacted and immediate song structures that climax, switch tone and are stimulated forward without stumbling into uncharted psychedelic territories. Like the segments of the album, each song has a definite beginning, middle and end, prompted by an attention grabbing instrument or an arresting vocal melody sung by Bradford Cox or Lockett Pundt. .
After October, when Microcastle is finally released by legitimate means, it will probably remain on the stereos, electronic devices and off the CD shelf, for a very long time. At least long enough to make its pre-release internet dramas become the postscripts they were meant to be; mentioned as an afterthought and resigned to be found at the bottom of a Wikipedia page.

Deerhunter – Never Stops
Deerhunter – Nothing Ever Happened

Tags: album