Thursday, June 27th 2013 // 22,30 // Palazzo Candiotti
Live

Defining Deerhunter forces one to space between noise, shoegaze and post-punk, only to inevitably return to pop. Just saying, the band is self-defined “ambient-punk”. When they got together in 2001, their intent was to blend hypnotic ambient moods, minimal music and garage rock noise and propulsion. Their first album, a low-fi experiment not originally intended for the wider audience, came out in 2005 for Stickfigure, a local Atlanta, GA, label. Officially untitled, it is known as “Turn it up, Faggot” – the phrase does not appear on the album sleeve but is an insult that Cox claimed was often thrown at the band during their early gigs, according to frontman Bradford Cox. Cryptograms, considered the real Deerhunter debut, comes out in 2006, year of the move with Chicago’s indie label Kranky. The meeting with the cult 4AD label in 2008 marks the beginning of their music’s distribution outside of the States, and the launch of Microcastle/Weird Era Cont., a 25-track colossus. The band’s uncontainable creativity and productivity leads them to produce the EP Rainwater Cassette Exchange the following year, and to begin touring worldwide in Europe, Japan, and Australia. Halcyon Digest comes in 2010, and is described as their best work to date: based on atypical instrumentation (banjo, acoustic guitar, electronic percussions, autoharp, harmonica, sax) Deerhunter create an album of overwhelming emotional depth, where pop sounds are even more organically integrated with the elements that make up the band’s unique sound. To announce the release, the band fully embraced the DIY mentality of their 70s and 80s New Wave heroes, making Cox-designed, cut-and-paste, Xeroxed flyers. A three-year hiatus follows, during which Cox and guitarist Lockett Pundt produce their own albums, respectively under the names Atlas Sound and Lotus Plaza.
In January of 2013, Deerhunter reunites with a new line-up including bassist Josh McKay and guitarist Frankie Broyles, alongside Cox, Pundt and veteran drummer Moses Archuleta. In the middle of the night, at Rare Book Studio in Brooklyn, NY, they record the new album Monomania, out in May. Defined by them as “avant-garde rock n’ roll”, the LP recalls the band’s scrappy punk aesthetic; a perfect nocturnal garage rock album full of the layered and hazy vintage guitar sounds that define Deerhunter.