The eighth album by Deerhunter comes with a lot of words attached, of varying degrees of usefulness. There is a prose poem by frontman Bradford Cox every bit as incomprehensible as the stuff Bob Dylan used to append to the back covers of his 60s albums, evidently written while Dylan was speeding his nuts off. There are simple descriptors of the themes in each song: genuinely illuminating when dealing with a writer such as Cox, whose lyrics are famously made up on the spot, stream-of-consciousness style. But most telling of all might be the press release trumpeting the arrival of Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? to the world, unmistakably also Cox’s handiwork. No “it’s our best album yet and we’re psyched for you to hear it” for the Atlanta band. Instead, it’s largely concerned with glumly pondering what the point of making albums is at all: “In an era when attention spans have been reduced to next to nothing, and the tactile grains of making music have been further reduced to algorithms and projected playlist placement.” He asks: “Is it needed now? Is it relevant? Perhaps only to a small audience.”
Announcing your new album with an existential crisis is an intriguing promotional tactic, but doing things the straightforward way isn’t Deerhunter’s thing. In any other band, you suspect Cox’s sexuality would be a major talking point – he identifies as a queer asexual, and two years ago informed an interviewer he was still a virgin – but it barely gets a look in, dwarfed by his reputation as an unpredictable contrarian. His interviews veer between alarmingly frank confessions about his physical and mental health and arch pronouncements he’s described as “performance art”. They come littered with bon mots you might describe as Morrissey-esque – “I’m proud to be hideous”, “Love is a populist construction” – were it not for the fact that he spent one interview turning every answer around to the subject of how much he hates Morrissey (“he makes me want to wear fur”). Deerhunter’s musical output veers wildly, too. Much of 2013’s Monomania sounded as if it was recorded in a bin; 2015’s Fading Frontier was lavishly appointed with 80s synthesisers and filled with conventionally commercial melodies; its follow-up, Double-Dream of Spring, was largely instrumental and released only on cassette in a limited edition of 300, apparently in protest at both the long lead times for vinyl and the flood of freely available content online.
Unpredictability is a rare and rather valuable commodity in a world of media-trained personalities and music dictated by the metrics of streaming services, and it’s something Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? has in abundance. Far less aesthetically cohesive than Monomania or Fading Frontier, it never settles, skipping without warning from harpsichord-bedecked psych-pop to icy Tubeway Army-ish synth instrumentals, from elegiac alt-rock ballads to stuff that sounds like a lo-fi take on 80s Japanese environmental music, its disparate strands just about held together by Cox’s drawling voice and the hazy quality of the production.
Much has been made of the fact that it was partly recorded in the sparsely populated Texan desert city of Marfa, and it’s not hard to work out how the environment influenced its sound: there’s a layer of echo suggestive of distance and empty space, while the rhythms have something of the sandstorm about them, distorted and gritty. Moreover, if there are moments where the album overplays its hand – a warped spoken-word track titled Detournement perhaps lays it on a bit thick – there’s a confidence about its stylistic leaps that means it feels like the expression of an authentically idiosyncratic imagination rather than someone being weird and eclectic for the sake of it.
The lyrics are similarly scattered: if the title somehow suggests another despairing broadside against the evils of Trump’s America from the US alt-rock fraternity, the reality is more intriguing and complex. You could certainly divine the overall mood of prickly unease and the references to pollution and toxicity in Element as having some basis in America’s current upheavals: “may God’s will be done in these poisoned hills and let the devil be cast out on his tail,” snaps opener Death in Midsummer, in the language of the Christian right. But they come amid a gush of disparate and fascinating ideas: Futurism rails against nostalgia as a “cage”, Plains depicts James Dean filming Giant in Marfa, the town’s isolation filling him with foreboding.
Indeed, the most expressly political thing here refers not to America, but the UK. No One’s Sleeping is an anguished response to the murder of MP Jo Cox, viewed from across the Atlantic. The music carries a distinct echo of the acoustic guitar-driven sound found on the Kinks’ Days or Picture Book; the lyrics mention village greens fading into darkness. It’s as if a stylised, quaint, distant view of England learned through Ray Davies’ songs is warping and fracturing. It is unexpected and strange, and, like the rest of the album, beautifully done.
This week Alexis listened to
Phil Cordell: Londonderry
Excavated on Ace’s superb forthcoming compilation Three Day Week, a bizarre, haunting attempt to turn the Troubles into echoing, glammy pop: musical archeology at its most compelling.
• Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? is released on 18 January
