Disclosure: Deerhunter are, IMO, the best new American band to come along in the last five years, so take into consideration that this review is written by someone who loves the band, loves their sound, and would likely love anything they do. So. Deerhunter's second album is a head-on collision between ambient feedback tones and poppy shoegaze music, and what makes it work as well as it does is the band's unerring sense of how to sequence a record.
Nobody today puts
albums together as well as Deerhunter does; each song expertly gains power by its placement in the whole, and I do not envy the task of whoever, ten years from now, is given the job of extracting tracks from their albums to put together a compilation. I suppose one reference point is Sonic Youth, but I feel like Deerhunter are even
better at combining their pop influences and their avantgarde influences; the band, through amazing production and the aforementioned sequencing, makes a straight-up pop track like "Spring Hall Convert" fit in perfectly with a weird piece of avantgarde disco like "Octet". The band would get even more poppy and outsized than this later, with the compressed masterpiece
Microcastle and the gorgeous pop record
Halcyon Digest, but this is easily the equal of those.
MY RATING:
9.2
Deerhunter - "Spring Hall Convert"
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