March 02, 2009

Deerhunter. Mezzanine, San Francisco.

By Jake Anderson

I had been listening to a lot of Deerhunter recently before seeing them live last week at the Mezzanine in San Fransisco.  Their first major album, Cryptograms, is a lush treasure chest of ambient hypnotic songs that occasionally hint at melodies but more often then not recede back into beautiful noise. Their followup, Microcastle, has more pop feel and clearly defined song structures, even sustained melodies. When we arrived at the venue they were doing sound check and I could tell they were going to test out some new material, which is a strange cross-pollination of their first and second albums.

Jared and I got the chance to interview lead singer Bradford Cox and bassist Josh Fauver and they were incredibly forthcoming with their views on everything from the nature of being an artist in a capitalist over-consumptive society to whether they would consider a romantic relationship with a robot, the answer to which was a resounding no.

The event itself was phenomenal. The turnout was huge, the energy intense, and the show was pretty much beyond description, but that’s just the despair of my inner writer’s block talking.  You see, Deerhunter is a band that seems to relish taking themselves and their audience on psychological field trips. Their music, especially live, transports you to deserted islands and faraway worlds and then returns you back to the bustling dance floor, your fists pumping and head bouncing.  It’s like the 2001 sequence when astronaut David Bowman takes the inter-dimensional portal through all of space/time and ends up in a pristine white room eating soup, then becomes the god-child. Or something like that. Stay tuned to Antics TV for the video of their interview, as well as footage from the show. It’s gonna be tubular.

Posted at 9:19am
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