Atlas Sounds is the moniker of Deerhunter frontman Bradford Cox channeling all he couldn’t make work with his day job. The accompanying blurb, for there is always accompanying blurb, turns our mindset to beck and drops and drops in the staple favourite phrase of “bedroom recordings”. I think this is meant to make you think of the artist as a cool but identifiable – a musical scientist tinkering away amongst the books and day to day detritus. I always think ropy production, maybe a few songs given two or three minutes of oxygen they didn’t deserve.
But this album does display that bedroom ambience in so much as it feels constricted. This is not an immediate criticism, the conflicting emotions on some songs; ‘Recent Bedroom’ and ‘Winter Vacation’ in particular, bleed to an altogether different one by virtue of their enforced proximity. The dreamlike vocals pushing and shoving against the gruff guitars and the dangerously underweight drums gives a feeling of lightness not always identifiable in lo-fi fare such as this.
How best to describe it? Lo-fi American Indie pulling together disparate styles and we’re back to beck once more. Like running through some interminable maze we find mellow gold at every turn. And yet, whilst sharing some aspects with LA’s weirdest son, the album as a whole shuns that sellotape culture; that strapping of style to style for an idiosyncratic beat. ‘On Guard’ for example sits willowy and bright at the heart of the album. The vocals undulate through a wave of synth and gently marimbaing drums. It’s got more in common with European ambient electronica than anything anti-folk has latterly spewed out.
It’s an album tuned to different radio stations, tuned to the waft and weave of electric stutterings and the crash of winds. It floats and harries and the tunes break through and disappear in equal measure. It is a challenging listen, no doubt. The difficulty lies in its quiet intricate structures. Often it’s hard to keep focus on the music without drifting off to be taken away by the ambient noise. The hooks are buried, not deep within walls of feedback or drums dripping in reverb, but in the competing elements that call for your attention. I prefer my songs to be direct, understandable. For all my rallying against such attitudes I find myself stupidly human I wish to pin down, and understand, and pigeonhole. But that is my issue alone.
With Atlas sounds, Bradford Cox has applied the self-same dissonance of thought to an electronic template. A burgeoning ever-shifting musical static of cranking percussion and wistful vocal.
//Jamie Brown