Atlas Sound – Parallax (4AD)
5/5
By: Joe Daniels
An unwilling poster-boy for alternative hipsterdom, Bradford Cox is one of the most enigmatic yet potent songwriters around, and between Deerhunter and his solo career – dubbed ‘Atlas Sound’ – he is able to oscillate between an art-rock and ambience as far as his fancy fits. What’s interesting now is that where this erstwhile dichotomy existed as separate cortexes of Cox’s brain – here, on Parallax – they conjoin.
Kicking off with ‘The Shakes’, it’s an album with a strange sense of alertness. The song itself is an instantly immediate, though thoroughly rewarding ditty which swirls and builds itself up into a joyous tailspin – the sort of tailspin only Cox can make joyous.
‘Te Amo’ is a contender for best song of the year, and one of the most heart-rendering tracks Cox – in any guise – has put out. With the refrain ‘We will go to sleep/ And we’ll have the same dream’, it is oblique yet wholly beautiful, suggesting an innate kinship which is matched by the dreamy, swirling, twinkling instrumental – a mixture of acoustic guitars, washing synths, and softly-softly percussion.
It’s an album of clandestine rewards, enjoyable from first listen yet ultimately difficult to penetrate, and this makes the experience as rewarding as it is challenging – much like Radiohead’s recent uphill LP The King of Limbs, it’s easy to write the record off when nice chunky choruses like those of ‘Lotus Flower’, or on here, the wonderfully summery ‘Mona Lisa’ are a few tracks away. However, this is where the album takes its true form – drifting in and out of focus as if bobbing around in water. Songs as potent as the forthright closer ‘Nightworks’ appear just after the virtually impossible ‘Flagstaff’, which stands initially as breezy ambient dander, yet after a few spins, becomes a beguiling mystery unto itself, smoothing its acoustic strums over with blissed-out filters.
So, in Parallax Bradford Cox has honed his strengths and in doing so, channelled both his penchant for the inaccessible and the immediate in such a way that does disservice to neither. It’s a quite remarkable album that blurs creative styles and comes straight from the heart of indie music’s most inscrutable players.
te amo // atlas sound by sexmusic
Artists in this article: Atlas Sound
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