Deerhunter - Halcyon Digest (album review)

When I first listened to Halcyon Digest, I didn't like it at all. Why? Because the album is painfully simple on first listen - I thought they were being lazy. Instead of focusing heavily on the atmosphere that gave past releases a hazy, shoegaze feel, Deerhunter have decided to rely almost entirely on their post-punk influence and pop hooks. That kind-of pissed me off at first, sure, but I knew well enough to give it another chance, and I'm glad I did; Halcyon Digest is a seemingly simple album - about the memories and inspirations that shape us - that gets more complex and rewarding every time you listen to it.

The album constantly references memories from the band members pasts. And they aren't just singing about their influences from the past, they're sounding like them too. "Don't Cry" sounds like Bradford relating to youth about his own past via a throwback to 1950's pop acts. "Coronado" – with saxophone used about as tastefully as it could be – brings on vibes like David Bowie used to. On "Desire Lines", Lockett Pundt (one of two songs he sings lead on, a first for Deerhunter) sings about reclaiming his youthful resiliance, a song which features the kind of kraut-rock inspired jamming that made Microcastle/Weird Era Cont the winners they were.

Singing about the past doesn't mean they always sound like it though; songs like "Helicopter", "Earthquake", and closer "He Would Have Laughed" sound like an amalgmated progression from Bradford's Atlas Sound and Lockett's Lotus Plaza camps, carving out sounds that are as unique as they are ethereal; accoustic guitar gently drifts in and out of the background on "Earthquake", crashing drums slowly blur into "Helicopter", and "He Would Have Laughed" is a sprawling procession of layered instruments coming and going around a simple melody and a gently repeated guitar part. Plenty ethereal.

Deerhunter have made an album packed with catchy hooks, which means the drawn-out (but wonderful) jams of past releases are now few and far between (we've got "Desire Lines", but it's not quite the same as "Nothing Ever Happened"). And while that is dissapointing, this album isn't about them treading the same musical ground again; it's a celebration of the road traveled.

Wavves - King of the Beach (album review)

Oh Nathan Williams, I'm fucking jealous of you man. You're younger than I am by a few years, and you've already recorded an album in your bedroom at your parents house, toured said album, had a drug induced 'meltdown' onstage – actually less of a meltdown and more of a kid with a guitar being a kid with a guitar - and fought one of the Black Lips; just a few of the things I was hoping to accomplish at this stage in my life. Not everybody sees these accomplishments as accolades however, and there's a considerable public and media escalated backlash against the guy as a person. So with all of this activity in the public, what's the best thing the Wavves frontman can do? Probably play guitar really loud, sing even louder, hire Jay Reatards rhythm section to beat the shit out of their instruments, and then just hammer it into everyone's head that all you want to do is have fun at the fucking beach. And what's so wrong with that? Fuck it, I wish I was at the beach right now. In the short period of time that he's been active as Wavves he has not only alienated people with his behaviour, he's divided the music community with his over-use of the gain knob and repetitious melodies. Here, he's proving the naysayers wrong by bringing out a sarcasm and new-found confidence that wasn't wholly present on the previous album, being more liberal with his use of gain, and kicking the songwriting up a notch.

So let's start off with the idea that King of the Beach is packed with happy-go-lucky 'I just drank a 40 and grabbed my skateboard' melodies that would fit right in with people who aim to do just that. The self titled track is literally about feeling like a king on the beach, capping it off with a chorus of “you're never gonna stop me”. Next-up, Super Soaker gets kind of angsty, but by the time Idiot comes on he's laughing it off, “I'm not supposed to be a kid / but I'm an idiot / I'd say I'm sorry / but it wouldn't mean shit.” It sounds negative on paper, but he fires the lines off with an attitude that keeps it feeling too upbeat and sarcastic to be heavy; maintaining a positive mood that carry's over the entire album.

That positive mood comes in a few flavours here. While on the last release the standout tracks were the ones where Williams had tackled the cut-time pop-punk vibe with swagger (yeah, fucking swagger), here even the tracks that would have been a noise mess - like 'goth girls' on the last album – are replaced by refined reverb-y pop happiness. It's the type of shit that would fit in perfectly on a newer Raveonettes album. When Will You Come, while not the strongest of tracks on the album, plays homage to the old Spector / Beach Boys big-slow drumbeat (it almost feels like a rite of musical passage for borrowing so much from them). Baseball Cards feels like some sort of blissful drug induced nostalgia of a childhood love that only he ever had, but at the same time it's something we've all experienced. He sings “I don't wanna walk outside” over and over again, and while he does cap it off with “without you” at the end of the song, it's almost unnecessary; we already knew.

I don't care which side of the Wavves hate train you're on; if you already love Wavves, cool, you already know this album pretty much capped off your summer perfectly, you know what's up. However, to the people who hate, the people who fail to acknowledge the gain knob as a lifestyle choice: it's only a matter of time.

Deftones - Diamond Eyes (music review)

Nu metal bands saturated the end of the 90's with all the worst parts of the 90's: angst towards some vague offender, hatred for oneself, useless dj's, unnecessary use of lame white guys rapping, blah blah blah. I could go on; this isn't anything new for anyone who remembers the 90's.

Anyways, amongst all the new shit rock, all the Limp Bizkits and Nickelbacks and Korns, there were the Deftones. And the Deftones really are a strange breed: straightforward enough to please the retards who listened to Durst (admittedly, myself included), melodic, even clever enough to get the attention of reputable critics, and catchy enough to get some decent mainstream play. But with screaming.

The most amazing part about this band, especially when you consider the scene they came up in, is that they're still going strong; the shelf life on most of those shit bands they were associated with was maybe 7 years, tops. But not only are they on their sixth release, Diamond Eyes, they wrote and set aside a whole other album in the last two years. That effort was to be called Eros.

Eros was supposed to be them experimenting with a new sound, taking the band in a new direction. Chino is quoted as saying he wanted it to sound as “weird as possible without alienating people”. Chi Cheng, their bassist, was hospitalized with a coma after his bus crashed on Novermber 8th of 2008, and a few months later they put Eros on hiatus and started working on Diamond Eyes. They say the two things are unrelated, but for an album that wasn't written because their bassist is in a coma, it sure as hell sounds like a band trying to relax because their bassist is in a fucking coma.

First of all, look at the history of bands that try experimenting with new material. Radiohead damn near broke up during the Kid A sessions because they argued over creative directions and were unsure of themselves. Likewise with Pink Floyd, arguing over creative direction in the 80's causes the band to break up. I'm not saying the Deftones were on their way to splitting up; I'm not even saying they were arguing. I'm saying that moving in a new direction often causes stress of some kind, and if your bassist is in the hospital, the last thing I'd imagine you wanting to do is something even remotely stressful.

So, my whole point is that Diamond Eyes is a through and through typical Deftones album, because that's what they needed to make right now. Nothing weird, nothing out of the ordinary, no extensive long odd instrumentals with strange talking in the background about anal-sex or whatever, no really oddly placed electronic parts. Just a collection of standard Deftones style songs. The really heavy track (CMND/CTRL and Rocket Skates), the quiet or more melodic one (Beauty School and Sextape), the obvious soon-to-be-fan-favourite and live-show-closer (976-EVIL, I hope). Just your bread and butter Deftones.

And that's not so much a bad thing. It sounds like the band just wanted to get an album out. They didn't like the approach they took to Saturday Night Wrist, a process that has been described as being 'Piece by piece', which to me sounds like a focus on multi-tracking (which is not that much fun for this kind of band). It sounds like a band in the studio engaging their hobby, and committing it to recording. This might as well have been what they did before, or after, going bowling on a Wednesday night.

“Hey guys, want to get together? Wife's busy, I've got nothin to do, what say we grab some brews, bowl a couple games, maybe write a whole fucking album?”
“Yeah sure man, why not, lets just churn out a whole fucking album like we usually do.”

Thankfully, 'how they usually do' sounds pretty fucking good.

So by all means, the album isn't groundbreaking, it's just a great album. Because it's a great album, it attests to how fucking well these guys get along, and how on top of their shit they are. They don't lose a member and decide break up. They don't lose a member and then completely lose their shit. They don't use the opportunity to do some monumental tribute to their lost bassist; across the 5 listens I've put in, I can't really pick out any solid Chi references.

To sum it all up, Deftones are still that band that should have sucked but didn't, and they're still putting out good albums that are worthy of purchase. When your friends are reminiscing about how shitty their taste in music was circa 1999, you can still toss in “but Deftones are still pretty rad...”, you get some weird looks at first until everyone remembers, “oh yeah...” Or maybe you're taking some cute girl out to a Vampire Weekend show, and she's complaining about her friends going to the dive bars for metal bands, complaining about metal as a whole. You nod your head to agree, but then remember, “oh fuck, Deftones.” I don't advise telling her that.

I fucking love the Deftones, I might talk her ear off all night about how Diamond Eyes is a good album. I might be going to sleep alone... But the point still stands.