Deerhunter - Monomania

Deerhunter - Monomania (2013)

http://4ad.com/news/22/3/2013/5thlongplayingalbumfromamericangarockgroupdeerhunter

01 Neon Junkyard
02 Leather Jacket II
03 The Missing
04 Pensacola
05 Dream Captain
06 Blue Agent
07 T.H.M.
08 Sleepwalking
09 Back to the Middle
10 Monomania
11 Nitebike
12 Punk (La Vie Anté:rieure)

I know little of this band, all I have is Halcyon Digest, of which 60% is shit and 40% is fucking brilliant.

I keep meaning to don my deerstalker and magnifying glass to find out more about them....

great news, awful art

  On 3/22/2013 at 11:05 PM, beerwolf said:

I know little of this band, all I have is Halcyon Digest, of which 60% is shit and 40% is fucking brilliant.

 

I keep meaning to don my deerstalker and magnifying glass to find out more about them....

I remember following them fairly early on, really enjoyed Cryptograms and the Fluorescent Grey EP which are fucking heavy on delay and distortion effects and more straight up noise rock/pop. I liked Microcastle and Halcyon Digest but never have listened to them at much, they definitely sounded different by the time Halcyon came out.

  On 3/22/2013 at 11:59 PM, jules said:

great news, awful art

Precisely.

  On 3/22/2013 at 11:05 PM, beerwolf said:

I know little of this band, all I have is Halcyon Digest, of which 60% is shit and 40% is fucking brilliant.

I think the brilliance outweighs the shit, but yes there are some dull moments I could have done without.

Deerhunter is a talented band. Excited to see what the sound of this record will be.

Just wanted to say that I actually like the album art. But it does seem they are paring down with each album.

Anywaysm, Great Band. Wasn't impressed by Bradford Cox's solo effort last year, but Halcyon Digest was immense so this should be good.

their bassist quit. weird. i'm wondering about this. really didn't like bradford's last solo album. actually, i'm pretty tired of him in general. i hope deerhunter isn't just becoming his backing band. monomania probably isn't the most reassuring name.

  On 3/23/2013 at 12:36 AM, joshuatx said:

 

  On 3/22/2013 at 11:05 PM, beerwolf said:

I know little of this band, all I have is Halcyon Digest, of which 60% is shit and 40% is fucking brilliant.

 

I keep meaning to don my deerstalker and magnifying glass to find out more about them....

 

I remember following them fairly early on, really enjoyed Cryptograms and the Fluorescent Grey EP which are fucking heavy on delay and distortion effects and more straight up noise rock/pop. I liked Microcastle and Halcyon Digest but never have listened to them at much, they definitely sounded different by the time Halcyon came out.

agreed

  On 3/23/2013 at 5:09 AM, zaphod said:

their bassist quit. weird. i'm wondering about this. really didn't like bradford's last solo album. actually, i'm pretty tired of him in general. i hope deerhunter isn't just becoming his backing band. monomania probably isn't the most reassuring name.

lol great point

Lockett Pundt is still in the band, so it's a bingo.

single is out

[youtubehd]bYUENZQ84-E[/youtubehd]

not sure about it. i like that it's loud and hard edged and garage rock-ish. i don't really care about it as a track though. was really hoping they'd go back to the sound of cryptograms. still afraid this is just bradford's fourth solo album. guy seems completely off his rocker at this point.

Is Bradford Cox turning into our generation's Billy Corgan?

Good song though.

i didn't like most of the stuff on the bedroom databanks. i've listened to literally every track he's released to the public, everything on his site. i'm just really weary of his persona. deerhunter was a respite from that because you could feel the influence of the other band members and i've always enjoyed lockett's contributions, sometimes more than anything else (agoraphobia is my favorite track post-cryptograms). i dunno, we'll see. nosebleed was a great song and that seemed to point the way toward "nocturnal garage" or whatever this album is going to be, although i'm guessing that track was more poppy than anyhing we'll hear on this one. i'm also a little sick of his lyrics.

cryptograms just has a really cool mix of ambient and very harsh garage rock textures, something i haven't come across in other music. but who knows, this is just one song, and the longest on the album. it might not be a sign of what things wil sound like. i just found halcyon digest and parallax to be extremely boring.

Halyocon Digest was boring imo. I might need to listen again, it had a few good songs but I felt the band got less interesting with everything after Cryptograms

Cryptograms was very early-Spiritualized. it was drug music and good drug music at that, spaced eerie, good.

Microcastle lost almost all of that and turned into kind of soft-indie rock but it had a few really, really good songs.

Halycon Digest I had lost most of my interest tbh

I enjoyed halcyon digest quite a bit. that monomania song is fucking terrible.

leaked.

wow, this is terrible. so far this is their worst album by some margin. it's all jaunty indie rock, horrid vocals. basically sounds like a shittier version of parallax mixed with the strokes.

enjoying this album a whole lot.

the monomania song really scared me. that's awful

  On 4/13/2013 at 6:27 AM, zaphod said:

wow, this is terrible. so far this is their worst album by some margin. it's all jaunty indie rock, horrid vocals. basically sounds like a shittier version of parallax mixed with the strokes.

agreed. brad's songwriting has gone to shit. very unimpressed with this record.

fourth listen in. hasn't grown on me at all, what happened to the "nocturnal garage" record they promised? this really just sounds like weird era cont. outtakes, except as another bradford solo album. even the lockett song just sounds like a leftover from spooky action. doesn't sound like a band anymore.

That title track single has me worried too. Not even sure this will be something I purchase at this rate. The Deerhunter collective had a good run of it so far in my estimation though: quite a productive, prolific period of releases, starting with Cryptograms, then Flourescent Grey, Microcastle and Weird Era Contd., Rainwater Cassette Exchange, Halcyon Digest, and the Atlas Sound and Lotus Plaza solo albums released in that time frame. That's a lot of good shit. Spooky Action at a Distance was a properly righteous shoegaze sorta thing, nice and coherent, one of the better releases of 2012. The whole Deerhunter collective, if they weren't on an upward trajectory, were at least keeping things strong...

Alright, so the title track for Monomania was somewhat grating to me, and then it goes on for two annoyingly long minutes that should have been cut. How anyone signed off on that or thought it should be a single FFS is beyond me. From what I've read about the sound of the record, it's purposefully nosier, which the title track certainly is. What I'm trying to say is, someone just tell me that track is one of the weaker ones on the album.

One last thing: why does this band have such a cast of rotating characters outside the core of Lockett and Bradford? They're like The Mars Volta of indie. We all know how that ended (right?). Bradford can seem like a bit of a self-righteous cunt in his interviews.

They kind of went out of their way to not sound like Deerhunter on this album. Like it's the music Brad's new persona would make. Maybe? I dunno. If they released this album as Elkhunter, I might not mind.

Well 3rd listen in now, sadly disappointed with at least half of the album. Vocals are strangely bad in places, even on the good tracks they're not awesome like on previous great tracks. The title track is ok but gets annoying at the end. I just don't know...not impressed overall but we'll see, I'm keeping it in rotation.

"Blue Agent" is probably my favorite.