Early on this new release from Atlanta’s best Mephistophelistic R.E.M. impersonators, super-angular frontman Bradford Cox gently coos “I had dreams/that frightened me awake.” He says it in a voice full of conversational terror, a voice that is used to that kind of thing. That is the heart and soul (or lack thereof) of this album in a nutshell: Cox trying to expel his demons by singing about them.

Later in the same song - Never Stops - Cox sensuously confides “I happened to escape/but my escape/would never come.” And that’s exactly the kind of environment the band creates around him, one of inequitable purgatory and sadness; guitars fuzz and grind maddeningly, drums pound and Cox’s distorted voice crows over and over in a tone that is equally mocking, gloating and despairing with growing hypnoticism, “it never stops.” And it makes you wish he was telling the truth.

That song might be the prevailing masterpiece of 2008, but it’s not like the rest of the album slouches off. Nothing Ever Happened is as close to a mainstream rock song that a band that sounds this much like early Sonic Youth is capable of writing. But even it spares more than a minute and a half to a guitar solo that sounds as if it is buried under three feet of sand. While Little Kids proves to be the albums apex of hysterical weirdness; it’s a kind of dystopian lullaby, with a shuffling guitar and appropriately adolescent tinkling xylophone over Cox’s distorted (in every sense of the word) mumblings about a group of children who set an old man aflame in an attempt to reject the eventuality of age. By the end of the song, a transfixed Cox whispers “to get older still” over and over again, while the guitar has a cerebral hemorrhage and the walls of the universe come crashing down. Cox seems to be saying that try as he and others might, maturity is inescapable. Like an art-rock JD Salinger.

The slow dip into helplessness that so defined The Catcher In The Rye thematically is alive and well here, Saved By Old Times sounds like it should be a rumination on the successes of the past, but instead it’s a dense, spoken word infused tale of kidnap and sonic torture by "Victorian vampires." Those vampires could very well represent the people who wanted awkward, bisexual Cox to be something different than what he wanted to be, but honestly, like almost everything here it’s hard to define with any sense of certainty.

The album’s slow, ambient waltz of a closer Twilight At Carbon Lake is a gloriously understated shuffle. The guitar churns and the drum is brushed icily while Cox sings a hopelessly autobiographical account of self-realization. It is the perfect ending, a hypothetical, musical Chapter 27 to Catcher: In which our hero, having reached the peak of his breakdown, is now prepared to enter the world whilst relatively sane. “Wave goodbye to the waves and the frozen shit/that was in your heart/so long.” So long.

Release date: 27/10/08
Artist website: www.myspace.com/deerhunter
Label: 4AD

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