Luis Minvielle“It’s just a shame you missed out on rock ‘n’ roll—it’s over! Over! You got here just in time for the death rattle—the last gasp.”
To most music aficionados, this punchline seems familiar. It could have been quipped by any music nerd at a thrift store’s second-hand vinyl sale or at a merch table just outside your favorite venue. Few festivalgoers would be stunned to read such phrases in online forums, especially after a line-up announcement. It seems that, in 2020, rock’s hour is long past.
Deerhunter – Halcyon Digest (4AD)
Truth be told, the “you missed out on rock and roll” quote is at least 20 years old. It’s one of the many Easter eggs placed in the classic film Almost Famous (2000), Cameron Crowe’s glorified take on music writers, rock stars, and life on the road. Lester Bangs (Philip Seymour Hoffman), “America’s greatest rock critic,” muses it to frame a pep talk to an aspiring journalist… in 1973.
It’s no surprise, then, that this very same feeling of rock being dead lurked indie music by the dawn of the 2010s. In retrospect, Robin Pecknold of the Fleet Foxes even called 2009 “the last year for a fertile strain” of indie rock music. Hindsight proves him right: in the 2010s, at least in critical terms, no other new artists fared as well as Kendrick Lamar or Frank Ocean, who brought new ideas through genres such as jazz, rap, and R&B. If rock had already died, then it was kept six feet under.
But when Atlanta’s darlings Deerhunter released Halcyon Digest in September of 2010, none of this seemed to matter.
Deerhunter’s fifth studio album, released on 4AD ten years ago last week, is an exhilarating, riveting tour de force that taps our appreciation for rock music, pervasive riffs, crunching basslines, and good ol’ bangers. To pull it off, Deerhunter had to remove their music from the present tense and encapsulate it into a warped memory. Frontperson Bradford Cox (and his co-pilot Lockett Pundt, who took on vocal duties on two tracks) crooned about dreaming little dreams, following golden lights, and going far away every day. In that vein, Halcyon Digest’s songs coexist in a world in which memories can be fabricated and wedged into a timeline in which indie rock still matters. Deerhunter fill that world with lore, stories, and ageless guitar licks which cast the album as one of the most exciting rock records of the last 20 years.
Deerhunter, a self-described “ambient punk” outfit formed in 2001 by Cox and his wingmen Pundt, Moses Archuleta, and the late Joshua Fauver, have claimed that the album title alludes to the phenomena of “writing and editing our memories” to be a digest version of what really once happened. Cox insisted that people romanticize the past, which seems about right when thinking about the “you missed out on rock, but there was a Golden Age” trope. What Deerhunter did not realize was that, by coiling and afterward romanticizing their memories, they were crafting perdurable rock staples that could belong to a Golden Age themselves.
Take “Desire Lines,” which opens the second half of the record with a triumphant, Arcade Fire-esque riff, but is then warped into a stone-cold, wary account of days past. The rhythm section buffers the verse with a catch-and-release pattern—when Pundt sings, the band hunkers down, but when he delivers, the drums and bass go all out on the front and mimic the feeling of jumping into the void and being suspended in the air. “Desire Lines” holds up as one of the most staggering rock tracks in their catalog. Ten years in, few songs in the rock world sound like it.
The next track, “Basement Scene,” epitomizes the discovery of this parallel music world. Cox sings about dreaming “a little dream” as if he were referring to Halcyon Digest’s own rock ‘n’ roll vision. “Basement Scene” first featured a wacky, psych indie-pop sound that would later be expanded to great success by bands such as Unknown Mortal Orchestra. In “Helicopter,” the record’s prime neo-psychedelia piece and one of its singles, Cox claims that “now they are through” with him. Even though fans know he’s talking about a mistreated prostitute, he could just as well be singing about fronting an outdated, dreary rock band.
Produced by Ben H. Allen, Halcyon Digest was recorded in different studios throughout Georgia. Even if Philadelphia was to become indie rock’s capital by the first half of the 2010s, both the album and Deerhunter ensured Atlanta’s presence in the decade’s review, a new milestone for the home state of some of alternative rock’s most innovative artists.
In a likely scenario, rock will be pronounced dead again in the years to come. A parallel, also likely scenario is that, even as rock music goes through its alleged agonies and into a very last gasp, Halcyon Digest will still deliver as what it is today and what it was in 2010—a one of a kind, invigorating record ready to catch up with our forsaken love for rock music, ready to wrap it up in a golden-lighted dream, and ready, as well, to light up that long-forgotten love and revive it.
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