Customer Reviews

Deerhunter

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Since I got this album back in fall of 2005, it has become one of my favorite albums. When you first listen, Deerhunter sounds like a much dirtier chaotic version Clinic with a really heavy no wave influence. Deerhunter's songs on this album are very deconstructed. Each song feels like it is just barely containing the energy that is trying to push the song apart into noise. They do a great job of walking the line between staying melodic and falling apart into fractured rhythms and noise. My personal favorites are "N. Animals", "Tech School", and "Basement."

This is merely Deerhunter's debut LP (read their entry on Wikipedia). It was named for what was shouted at the band during their early shows. It is readily available as their self-titled debut. As the band got a little more distance from the material, they wanted to just let it fade away. Bradford has said he finds the album "too negative" and more-or-less just wants to move on from this point. It must be noted that he was marinating in death when he was recording this. In fact, it was the desire to make an album not as depressing that influenced "Cryptograms". The tracklistings for this LP and the "Deerhunter" LP are identical and are as follows: 1. N[ew] Animals 2. Adorno 3. Tech School 4. Ponds 5. Language/Violence 6. Oceans 7. Basement 8. Young Layer 9. Death Drag. That's it. Some versions have a video for Oceans but I imagine you could see it on YouTube. I rated it as such because it seems to me that the band wants to forget this, and I think that says to me that however good this music is, and it is really good, it's not music they want to remember. It's a lot like Neil Young's "Time Fades Away" which that artist just wants to forget because of bad memories while recording it, and I'm perfectly comfortable letting them do just that.

Deerhunter's where it's at. It's 2:12pm Eastern Standard Time here and "Adorno" is exactly how music should sound at the moment.
Creative Disease - our highest recommendation.

Maybe I should have paid closer attention to other reviews before gambling on this disk. I had never heard of Deerhunter before and the song preview function wasn't working well, I only got to hear a piece of one song before I purchased this.

Anyway, I think one reviewer compared them to the 80's static-E wall noise of Sonic Youth, another band I could never get into no matter how hard I tried. I just really don't care for this album. Maybe you will but I put it in and tried to dig it and it just took me for a ride with no hooks and lots of noisy repetition. I don't dig it. Maybe they have better albums but this one blows in my opinion.