logos

Bradford Cox has evolved. His evolution from bedroom-rock pessimist to extroverted noise-popper was one that never saw the light of privacy. His blog, dedicated to the Atlas Sound moniker, as well as his proper band Deerhunter and Deerhunter guitarist Lockett Pundt’s solo project Lotus Plaza, is loaded with posts about rainwater cassettes, youtube videos and micromixes (one of which contained a pretty awesome Badlands score intro). Dude really put himself out there.

To make matters even more public, Cox made a record that acted as his ethereal music diary: Let The Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel. It was a prototype Kranky record: spacious, ambient and dark. But Cox painted the album with pictures of a quarantined child dreaming of wide, open spaces. It stamped Cox's presence in the indie community as a noise-rock troubadour.



Logos, Cox's sophomore LP, couldn't be any more different. The record is a global and varied collection of songs and if it plays as a diary, it would belong to most of Cox's friends and influences. Cox stated in a recent Pitchfork interview that most of the songs on the album are non-autobiographical, and that in contrast with Let the Blind, Logos is less introverted because it simply just got too boring. To judge the first two tracks on the album, I would’ve thought he backed down on his statement.

The album begins with “The Light That Failed”, a folk song at heart laced with glitches and ticks that result in a pretty soft electro-acoustic track. Followed by “An Orchid”, which sounds like a post-Microcastle Deerhunter song. So far, the songs seem like typical Coxian noisy doo-wop.

But the standout third track, “Walkabout”, contains the much-talked-about collaboration with Animal Collective wonder-voice Panda Bear, who’s credited on the album as Noah Lennox. The song was officially released for online streaming mid-summer and acted as the best solution to summertime boredom. It’s a lighthearted, sunny song that builds upward from a Dovers sample and can stand on its own as being one of the best songs of the year. But I guess when you’re working with someone like Lennox who produced Person Pitch, a lush, smiley, loop-heavy album, you can’t expect anything less than high spirits.

“Sheila” reaffirms Cox’s transition from the obscure to poppy with a chorus that’ll stick to your head: “Sheila/You’ll be my wife/You’ll share my life.” “Quick Canal”, the album’s mid-hump clocking in at eight minutes, has Laetitia Sadier of Stereolab fame contributing main vocals and doing her best Thom Yorke croon, while Cox stands in the back. It’s really the album’s core track with a long minimal sound-wave looping over Sadier’s indecipherable voice.

The rest of the album goes through different rhythms with a slow acoustic recovery from the Sadier track (“My Halo”) to ambient-microhouse (“Washington School”), and to songs where Cox alters his voice to sound eerily similar to Kevin Drew of Broken Social Scene (“Kid Klimax” and “Logos”).

Logos is some kind of brilliant mixtape without actually being a mixtape. An album that has really traveled around the community. An album that is above Cox’s personal and physical quarantines and under his new-found comfort.