Deerhunter - Halcyon Digest

Even now, four albums into their career, there remains much that’s confusing and hard to pin down about Deerhunter. The Atlanta group’s songs are full of blurry contradictions: between youth and adulthood; old and new; reality and fevered, dreamlike states. Theirs is a sound, though, that’s undeniably rooted in heavy sadness: frontman Bradford Cox explained how he wanted this latest record to explore “the way that we rewrite and edit our memories to be a digest version of what we want to remember, and how that's kind of sad.” Cox himself delivers one of the saddest lines of 2010 on the album-closing ‘He Would Have Laughed’, his “Where did my friends go?...” lament summing up so much, and yet so little, about this curious, strange band.