Deerhunter interview

My interview with those loopy noise merchants deerhunter is now oop on analogue magazine. Read it here! In other news I saw a couple who must have been in their 70s buy callipo ice pops in Super Valu Kells today. This should be the quintessential cute romantic moment. It wasn't. They sat in the front seats of their Nissan and stared stonily out of the opposite windows as they licked their pops, trapped in some sort of sour loveless hell. Judging by the deep lines of mutual resentment etched into their elderly noggins they might as well have been sucking frozen badger piss out of their colourful ice-cream sheaths. Ah well.

Animal Collective later! Woop!



Or maybe not.

And neon burns my sight...

Deerhunter in Whelans last night was the synapse frazzling culmination of an epic few days of drinkin' and giggin' that also took in Modeselektor and Animal Collective and left me feeling like a spent and delicate husk of my former self. I was gonna do a leaving cert style treatment of Animal Collective and Deerhunter in the compare and contrast these two bands vein. But as lots of fellow Bloggers have done a good job of discussing the 'collective, I won't add too much to things. Only this. At times Animal Collective sounded so strange and out there out it felt that new, unused parts of my brain were being stimulated and booting up for the first time. Yet to not inform the crowd of Avey Tare's vocal problems at the start was a real head-scratcher, not to mention a bit of a swizz. It was obvious that something was up. I know that they are rarely conventional in what they play live, but c'mon to get that far in to proceedings without barely a peep of his inimitable bonkers vocals? If people knew what was up from the get-go, I wager they'd have gone with the flow and enjoyed things a bit more, rather than looked awkwardly around to see if anyone else was as confused as they were. Click! Loreana snapped this stonker.



And then there was Deerhunter in Whelan's...again, the photo is courtesy of Loreana.


Not the world's most vertical bunch of musicians...

What a fuckin' show. When they ended on a wild, ragged interpretation of their psychedelic masterpiece Strange Lights, the whooshy madness emanating from their guitars was equivalent to the full brunt of a hurricane. All the stuff they played sounded so raw and untamed and most tunes generally stretched into spacious and textured grooves that were longer than the recorded versions but didn't drone past their welcome. It was only bleedin' massive. There is still a barely perceptible hum in my right ear. Maybe I'm damaged? It was worth it. And my borderline obsessed fan of a girlfriend who did a shoot with them, somehow had them dedicate Like New to her.

A thought occurred to me during the gig and I've probably harped on about it a bit here before. Much of the crowd seemed a little too cool for school and weren't exactly getting into it. I wished they'd loosen up a bit. This is the case with so many of my favourite bands. They end up playing a set that moves the earth to a sea of blank faces all doing that barely perceptible hipster nod thing. I mean, how could you not move to deerhunter, this was phenomenal music. I wish some of the apeshit modeselektor fans from Thursday were there. They would have shook things down!

P.S Did you see the huge runny strings of drool oozing out of guitarist Colin's mouth? I thought he was going to keel over and seize up. Whatever he was on, it didn't seem to have too bad an impact on his ability to play though.

P.P.S Support dude Y.A.C.H.T while not exactly my cup of tea, did a hilarious line of freakin' out the squares by dancing like a malfunctioning robot child with imaginary instruments in the midst of a frankly terrified audience. He also conducted a bizzarro Q&A with the audience and ended up chatting for a good five minutes about his recently deceased cat.

Today's treat combines two of my favourite bands in one nifty little package. It's a rattley-clattery-ghostly cover of Knife by Grizzly Bear by Bradford from Deerhunter's side project Atlas Sound. Its on a new EP by Grizzly Bear (Friend EP) that's out today and by all accounts thus far, sounds like its well worth the shillings. Its heaving with new material from Grizzly Bear and a few remixes (11 tracks in total). Everything that band does is solid gold in my book (well maybe not their poops, but everything else).

MP3:Grizzly Bear-Knife (covered by Atlas Sound)