Review Summary: "We were trapped in the basement of the fucking teenage halfway hell.”
NOTE: This review is for both Microcastle and its sister disc Weird Era Cont.
Microcastle/Weird Era Cont. is one of the best rock albums of the 2000’s. It isn’t often a band is able to achieve a level of urgency a la the Pixies and simultaneously churn out potent indie gems that withstand the test of time. Like the miniature castle the album suggests, each song is a masterfully crafted powerhouse, stunning in detail and undeniable beauty. Such pretentious descriptions come at the result of gorgeous chord progressions and hazy soundscapes that one could attribute to a wide variety of musical acts from the 80’s. For this reason,
Microcastle may seem like a nostalgia trip on the surface. At its core, though, there’s a dimension of experimentation buried beneath the noise– blissful, heart-breaking, insurgent noise– and that is why it continues to influence rock music into the 2010’s.
Listening to Deerhunter’s masterful implementation of dissonance, we inevitably question the mental state of our narrator, or in this case, the lead vocalist Bradford Cox. On
Microcastle, the lyrics are hard-hitting yet vague, finding a perfect balance between universal appeal and adolescent gloom. The first disc is rarely esoteric, unlike its sister disc
Weird Era Cont, which revels in its ability to emulate the sensibilities of a foreign arthouse flick. A minimal guitar lead shimmers and explodes into an understated yet effective climax in the opener “Agoraphobia,” a beautiful ode to incarceration by emotional despondency. The metronomical guitar lead provides an apt mid-tempo soundtrack for swaying side-to-side in a straitjacket. (“No echo in this space…”)
Found across both discs is a brooding, unstoppable whirlwind of emotion, elevated by ethereal walls of sound and fury. “Twilight At Carbon Lake,” is a slow-burning and absorbing meditation on our narrator’s self-pity– and one that ends
Microcastle in a wall of cacophonous, pounding guitar chords, effectively juxtaposing the minimal and solemn “Agoraphobia.” Ignoring that it’s possibly the most powerful moment on the album, it’s a fitting closer to the first disc, smashing to pieces the miniature castle it built before itself. It’s moments like this that reinforce how universally engaging these songs are, thanks to a strong sense of what makes us human (wanting to destroy something beautiful) and how we manage those impulses (... even if it’s ourselves).
When the opening notes of
Weird Era Cont. erupt seemingly without warning, we’re thrown into a completely different landscape than the first disc. Forget all the rules you learned in the largely reality-based
Microcastle, because
Weird Era Cont. may just be the most demanding thing Deerhunter has delivered to their listener-base. Endlessly absorbing, the whole thing is reminiscent of a bizarre fever dream, complete with imagery so familiar, yet so distant. The lyrics convey emotions that are as primal as they are abstract, and, as per usual for Deerhunter, they’re hidden behind a thick shroud of shoegazing. Suddenly, the comparison to a foreign arthouse flick starts to make sense, but this time, there aren’t any subtitles, and the director was inspired by David Lynch.
With that being said, to constantly examine
Weird Era Cont. is detrimental to what it attempts to accomplish. It demands that you submit to its omnipotent haze, which can be off-putting for anyone trying to detect faint glimmers of humanity on its surface. Lyrically, it’s the antithesis to Microcastle, contrasting comprehensible, meticulous poetry with bareboned prose. (“Stay, I don’t want you to stay…”) Here’s the kicker: this minimalistic approach to lyrics is overshadowed by Deerhunter’s thickest walls of sound yet, often rendering the lyrics indecipherable. Only fragments of humanity linger in these barren landscapes, as they’ve been broken down to their primal core. “Vox Celeste,” for example, is the most intimate track on the disc, complete with static-y guitar sounds and washed-out vocals, successfully emulating a scrambled Playboy channel. “God, if only we could get to the bottom of what the hell our narrator is saying,” is what you may be thinking. But what if our imagination is supposed to fill in the cracks? Doesn’t that make for a more intimate experience?– This is what a scrambled Playboy channel, a foreign arthouse flick with no subtitles, and
Weird Era Cont. have in common: They require that we project ourselves onto them, so that they won’t be so hopelessly inhumane. This is why
Weird Era Cont. needs the lively Microcastle to function, because, well, what is an LSD trip without a receptor?
Buried beneath the rubble of Deerhunter’s
Microcastle are strong musical influences that ring true throughout the annals of rock music. To name-drop Can, Stereolab, and The Velvet Underground is not only lazily redundant in relation to the current state of rock music critique today, it is also insulting to a band like Deerhunter who, at this point in their career, have successfully forged a sound of their own.
Microcastle/Weird Era Cont. does shoegaze better than modern shoegaze bands do, and the driving rhythms of disco elevate its appeal beyond pretentious assholes. It’s truly remarkable, and if it wasn’t already clear, Deerhunter possess a dynamic utility of sound: Melodic, yet dissonant. Transcendental, yet grim. Cox enjoys building his listener up and breaking them down again, and the truth is, when it’s as well-executed as it is here, all is forgiven.
In a recent interview, Pitchfork sat Cox down for a discussion about nostalgia, and when asked which album of his he felt most nostalgic for, he referred to
Microcastle/Weird Era Cont. as the “Unloved child, believe it or not,” and as much as I love this record, it’s not hard to see why. Following up their 2007 breakout, Cryptograms, was a daunting task, and with the added drama of
Weird Era Cont. being recorded over the course of one week in response to the leak of Microcastle, the anxieties of hair-pulling and nail-biting portrayed in the album became a reality surrounding its release. Transitional periods are not often looked back on with rose-tinted glasses, but that doesn’t make them any less essential. And like the young German boy with an appetite for being buried alive that inspired “Agoraphobia,” it’s rather fitting that this album is the unloved child, isn’t it?
"We were trapped in the basement. We were trapped in the basement of the ***ing teenage halfway hell.”
