Revisited: Deerhunter, Turn It Up Faggot
Tuesday, October 20th, 2009
Remember Deerhunter? Not the Deerhunter, mind you, of Brooklyn Vegan hype or Pitchfork Best New Music fame, and not the Spike Jonze/Trent Reznor-hanging Deerhunter, but Atlanta’s Deerhunter. Remember when they gigged tirelessly, I mean, all the damn time, at the Drunken Unicorn here in town, or at the sweaty, dank Caledonia Lounge over in Athens? Above all, do you remember Turn It Up Faggot? Yeah, the one with a Black Lips’ dick on the cover. Notoriously effusive frontman Bradford Cox would just as soon have you purge it from memory — he’s trashed the band’s grimy, lo-fi debut in interviews, citing, among other apparent pratfalls, the band’s musical immaturity at the time.
While it’s definitely true that the songs on Turn It Up Faggot lack a certain cohesiveness aptly displayed on Deerhunter’s following recordings (say what you will about Cox and his occasionally impish ways, the guy knows how to put an album together), there exists throughout the record a gnarled, raw sort of furor that is nowhere to be found on, say, Cryptograms. Chalk it up to artistic evolution, if you will — obviously, a band must grow, mature, change; if not, you’re Kiss. With all the best groups, though, there’s usually a good deal of intrigue, if not all-out enjoyment, to be found by examining and absorbing their earliest work. In this case, TIUF, ugly scabs and all, contains some revelatory stuff. (more…)
Within the first few seconds of pressing play on The Eternal, Sonic Youth’s 16th studio album in nearly 30 years, the band sounds like it has been recharged. “Sacred Trickster” tears the album wide open with a visceral intensity that surges into “Anti-Orgasm,” bringing the album to a frenzied climax of noise, and chiming, art-punk dirge.
