Deerhunter
9/29/07
Empty Bottle in Chicago
Do yourself a favor: take every regret you’ve ever had in your life and drop it like a textbook. Don’t look as it hits the ground. Take all your feelings of loneliness and forget even the dendrites and synapses that are responsible. Now, move and let that movement be a release. Move every part of your body. Let your muscles scream. Run, dance, jump-move in any way you can and let the repetition heal you in a way that walking every day with purpose and thoughts just can’t. This is the feeling of Deerhunter. It’s the feeling of letting yourself go and that the rest of the world doesn’t really exist. It’s the feeling of relief.
If Deerhunter’s sound was a landscape, it would be under an open sky at midnight in the middle of a city. There would be streams of light and fireflies and the buildings would echo back a response to every chord struck. Deerhunter is the new shoegaze or self dubbed “ambient punk” with reverb galore and repetition of lyrics and progressions that provides for a slight disorientation. Their sound is massive and eerie all at once. These Georgians aren’t exactly psychedic but they aren’t completely electronica either. First, there’s a certain aesthetic to playing instruments and Deerhunter plays their very well. With five on stage (two guitarists, a bssist, drummer, and Bradford Cox delivering both tangential banter and the lyrics that shattered around the room like glass, it was a full and complete effect of songs mainly from their full length Cryptograms (though, they did play one new song)
Bradford himself added to his eerie outlook by wearing a skeletal shirt and telling everyone how happy he was to be playing a festival putting on by a mag he stole when he was 16. (He also thanked The Ponys for letting them borrow some equipment) He was slightly less unpredictable than I’m sure he’s been in previous live shows, which is possibly because he was sick with the flu while on stage according to him. Still, there was crowd surfing at the bottle, which is somewhat rare, and I felt that the set was at least as decent as theirs has been previously at Pitchfork Music Festival, if not even better. Though I enjoy listening to Cryptograms, this band is one to be experienced in a live setting.