Deerhunter's Halcyon Digest

Bum, bum, bsh.

Click.

Bum, bum, bsh.

Click.

This is how "Earthquake" of Deerhunter's "Halcyon Digest" (2010) begins, directly out of my memory. All five minutes of the track are burned in my memory (or is it?), including that crawling staircase of a guitar leading upward to Bradford Cox mumbling, "Do you, recall?..."

And yet I have every reason to question my memory - in fact, I have every reason to question the experiences I had, listening to the album. I can't tell you what produces the "bum, bum, bsh" and the "click" beginning the track. Is this a recording of an instrument? Is it a dub of a recording? Was it made by the band, or is it a sample?

Do these questions even matter? After all, the music is just music. And yet it does seem Deerhunter invites you to ask - there's something about the sound that makes one question, Where did it come from? And questions, indeed, comprise the entirety of the lyrics of "Earthquake":

Do you, recall? your face was white as all? Do you bone the sheets? Do you think of me? ... Your long lost friend, from the sea...
How long was he...? How long was he...? How long was he...?

all in a blurred voice, hidden in a haze, not nearly in a drawl but in a kind of hesitation, while some instrument rattles faster and louder as if we were coming across an imminent threat in a David Lynch film.

This is "Halcyon Digest", down to a T: it is the murk that comes from experiencing events firsthand, and it is the struggle that comes from trying to remember events precisely as they happened. It is an album about confusion and loss, and finally reconciling both of these. As Bradford Cox, Deerhunter's frontman, has said,

The album's title is a reference to a collection of fond memories and even invented ones, like my friendship with Ricky Wilson or the fact that I live in an abandoned victorian autoharp factory. The way that we write and rewrite and edit our memories to be a digest version of what we want to remember, and how that's kind of sad.

(...which citation I can't find, except on the Wikipedia article.)

And it's interesting how, after the pondering lo-fi "Earthquake", what succeeds is the sorta-rock-n'-roll of "Don't Cry", where I can tell you, yes, that's a guitar, and those are drums, and maybe there's a cowbell. And yet how can you categorize as lascivious, rebellious rock n' roll Cox's melancholic "Come on, little boy, I'm your friend... / and I understand, the pain you're in." In a sense, that is rock: the snarl and stomp of rock has a communal spirit to it, not just a horny one, more The Who than The Rolling Stones. But "Don't Cry" is a song not for a party but for two people: an unidentified listener, and an unidentified singer, who may or may not be real. It could even be the little voice in our heads comforting us: "Come on, kid, keep your head up and fight, / you don't need to understand the reasons why, / oh why, oh why, oh why, oh."

What follows is "Revival", beginning with the lyrics "I'm saved, I'm saved" - which would conclude the character arc introduced in its immediate predecessor if we actually believed it. For one, Cox's voice is covered in the grime in the previous songs, slurring the words substantially (I actually didn't know the lyrics until now). Further, if we learned anything from "Don't Cry", we know the subject of the music tends to enhance and romanticize and exaggerate their pain. The lyrics, "I felt his presence near me - / I know they won't believe me, / but I've got favorite memories", are meant to convey that, how should we say, lie. This ends with Cox wailing, "Darkness, always - / it doesn't make much sense. / Darkness, always, / away from me, darling, / calling Stay."

And then, finally, one of the great-great songs: "Sailing". "Sailing" lapses back into the slow meditative groove of opening track of "Earthquake"; it's interesting how the titles "Sailing" and "Earthquake" revolve around concrete, physical phenomena, while "Don't Cry" and "Revival" are more emotional words. In any case, where "Earthquake" over time builds the music up louder and more ornate, "Sailing" largely sticks to an electric guitar without drums. Cox mumbles to himself,

Wind in my sails, I lived for days. No water, no food, it was good.
I didn't mind, no. Nowhere to be, nothing to see, except me.

There's a lonely Dickinson-esque quality to "Sailing", of someone who is both forced and has chosen to isolate themselves from other human beings. I think both interpretations fit because the singer doesn't hate his loneliness, neither is he ambivalent to it, as he later encourages himself,

Only fear can make you feel lonely out here, you learn to accept whatever you can get.

And this is an interesting aspect of Deerhunter: Bradford Cox isn't a great singer, neither is he a great writer, and yet there is undeniable emotion in his performance and how he hangs on words. The guitar and Cox's singing are enough to evoke the winds and waves the lyrics are conveying, and the whistle the wind makes in one's solitude. I generally hesitate to attribute lyrics to a singer's life unless they explicitly say so, but there's so much emotion - the listlessness, the hopelessness - in Cox's voice that one thinks it is about him.

Another interesting thing: "Sailing" is one of the longer songs of the album. Most of the songs are quick, festival-ready jams, clocking in under 3 minutes or so, but "Sailing" shares the same length as the great-great-great track "Helicopter", where the band paints a full scene to the listener. The album seems to be constructed of bursts of frisson as in "Don't Cry" and "Revival", lingering later in larger scenes as with "Earthquake" and "Sailing". The former seems to be, "This is what I feel", and the latter is "This is who I am (or, who I think I am)."

Which leads us to another festival song, "Memory Boy", containing what is probably the best hook on the album. I thought for five seconds whether I should attempt to describe it, but I'm not going to make my sorry try, it'll be too embarrassing. Instead, I'll turn to the lyrics, which continue the theme we had been discussing:

Did you stick with me? Let me jog my memory; I see you leaving, oh, don't forget your TV,
It's not a house anymore, it's not a house anymore,

as the guitar (I really don't know what the instruments are) squeals, running up and down like a child. In a brief moment of angst, the singer cries,

Try to recognize your son, in your eyes he's gone, gone, gone, gone gone gone...

"Memory Boy" is one of the more pivotal songs on the album because it condenses a lot of the song's themes into it: the album is not simply about memory and experiencing, it's specifically about forgetting and being stripped of whom you are. "Memory Boy" sonically has a resemblance to indie-pop, but the material is actually quite dour; someone is trying to remember a scene in their youth, or a person they liked, or simply anything to latch onto, but they're finding out in real-time how quickly and totally these memories have vanished. And just like "Sailing", this fact is remarked with the same listlessness, the same shrug of "whatever" as the singer has always had the whole album. Which can be seen as another theme of "Halcyon Digest", that of decay, that of passiveness, to the point of self-destruction.

I'm not going to cover "Desire Lines" and "Basement Scene" much because they cover material we've already discussed, though "Desire Lines" makes many of these themes explicit, with the opening lyrics

Remember when you were young and your excitement showed, but as time goes by, is it outgrown?
Is that the way things go? Forever reaching for the gold...

with Cox later exhorting the listener,

Walking free, wo-ah, come with me, wo-ah, far away, wo-ah, everyday, wo-ah,

Then there's "Basement Scene" where Cox literally begs, "I don't want to wake up." And there's the haunting end to the song, where Cox wails, "In the bluffs they know my name, / in the bluffs they know..." as if he is aware at the very moment he is being forgotten and disappearing.

Right-o. Now the great song - actually, all the songs ending the album are just capital-G Great, which is rare for an album. But we arrive at the capital-G Capital-G Great song, "Helicopter", where they repeat that same weird percussive effect as "Earthquake", that of a drum loop being soaked in echo. I have no idea what is producing the "strings" (I think they're strings), but they've been filtered through something to sound sweet and syrupy like a synth, and yet my brain tells me it's not a synth. Both of these elements, the abrasive drum and the bright guitar, come from our two categories of track, the tracks where the singer despairs of whom they are at the moment, and the tracks where the singer wears rose-colored glasses about their past. This is all under the context that Cox wrote the song about a guy who was pushed out of a helicopter, after he became disposable to the criminals who loved him.

Again, I don't see anything particularly worthy in the lyrics and the vocal performance in themselves, but when Cox sings,

Take my hand and pray with me, my final days of company, the devil now has come for me, and helicopters set me to sleep,

and when the music swells, as Dima falls from the helicopter, as time slows to a standstill and his life flashes before his eyes, Cox continues,

And I pray for us, could you pray for us? We know he loves you the best, we know he loves you the best.

it just...it just fucks you up. I believe music is magic, and this is one of those magical moments where I don't know how the effect is arrived at.

I think "Helicopter" is the first track on "Halcyon Digest" where the singer acknowledges, yes, it's all over, and there's nothing ahead of my life. You can argue the previous tracks were "cope", him trying to reflect on his current status and force himself to be in the present. "Helicopter" is a release - a fantastical release, Deerhunter isn't telling anyone to do anything equivalent, but a release all the same, a scene frozen in time, while the singer is literally plummeting to their death, where the singer acknowledges that his life hasn't always been so great but it was overall good, and he accepts what comes after (with the lyric, "I'm tired of my pain").

To finish off the singer's emotional arc, the song ends with the verses:

Oh these drugs, they play on me in these terrible ways, they don't pay, like they used to pay, I used to make it day to day,

(which, by the way, conjures up the image of Dennis Dinion, the person on the album's cover and the once-contestant of the Miss Star Lite Pageant, furthering the album's theme of how we see ourselves and how we actually are and the blurring of those two realities.)

In an emotional outburst, Cox sings,

No one cares for me, I keep no company, I have memories and now they are through with me,

with the song ending with the repetition of "now they are through with me", where the song suggests that there aren't any hard feelings between the person of that "me" and the people of that "they".

"Helicopter" is essentially a culmination of the album's ideas; following it are "Fountain Stairs" and "Coronado", which are variations of these ideas. They also happen to be the most "fun" songs in the album; they are likely palatable for people whose tastes are attuned to indie-rock, being fairly hooky, rock-inflected and festival-feeling.

In fact, "Fountain Stairs" sounds...normal. No reverb, just guitars and drums, which is the right time to give credit to Joshua Fauver on bass and Moses Archuleta on drums, particularly for his pounding performance on the chorus. Going by Wikipedia, Lockett Pundt does lead vocals on "Fountain Stairs", which is...hmm. I cannot hear it at all. (He also apparently sings on "Desire Lines", which I can believe a bit more; his voice just seems "rougher" than Cox's.) "Fountain Stairs" and "Coronado" also share a glorious, true rock n' roll saxophone, through the player Bill Oglesby. Possibly because Pundt leads, the lyrics are fairly simple, detailing a memory: "I forgot my book / at the fountain stairs / at a chapter on symmetry, / nobody cared." But after "Helicopter", simplicity is fine; the end of the album is a good place where the artists can have fun and mess around, the theme of the album having been established earlier.

Which "Coronado" does, opening up with a glorious sax. Well, really, "Coronado" begins with that simple piano melody (I'm pretty sure those are keys, even though there's no credit), which is doubled soon after with the guitars. The track doesn't begin with silence in the same vein as "Sailing", but it's a stark beginning, with a single instrument, compared to every other track. Considering that, after "Helicopter", the singer seems to regress into a state of innocence, I always interpreted this beginning as showing the singer as living through their memories fully - whereas in other tracks the singer has access to their memories in haze, the events in "Coronado" are bright and clear, as if on a sunny day. Alternatively, the singer is now living in a complete fantasy; they are certain of what they are saying, but they have fooled themselves into believing a fabrication. Hence the glorious sax, which is a strident, confident sax you'd hear in something in "Exile on Main St" (1972).

This is contrasted, of course, with the lyrics:

I was sick, I was dead, lay my head on the cement bed,

(here the sax comes in),

I had a few good years, oh, but they don't know,
come on down, don't leave me hanging because I want to get down before I start believing what they said.

and then Bill be blowin'.

Yeah, "Coronado" is the big rock n' roll song, but the singer is partying because they're dying, and they're fully in the belief they're going to die alone. There's a big "Fuck it, I'm going out, it's not so bad" feel, which is depressing as hell when you think about it, but the music rocks. And a lyric, "And if I go ahead I know that you're leaving, / I can't wait to see you go", is reminiscent of Neutral Milk Hotel's "But don't hate her when she gets up to leave."

Alright. If I said "Helicopter" is the Great Great Great song, then "He Would Have Laughed" is the Great Great Great ... Great Great Great-and-then-just-do-that-until-infinity song, dedicated to the great Jay Reatard. This song haunts my dreams; it forwards the optimism-in-death feeling developed toward the end of the album, and yet the music is luminous, beautiful, heavenly and somehow ethereal, a Paul McPherson playing the six-string guitar for this track. Listening to it now it's hard to get past the intro; I get emotional listening to that flowing melody on the guitar, which feels like sailing on the river of dreams, and then another string enters, criss-crossing over the other guitar, leaving trails in the air like fireflies. Moses Archuleta then enters quietly like thunder on the drums, and you're fully transported to fairyland. Cox then boasts,

Only bored as I get older, find the ways to cult, cult of time...
Only bored as I get older, find new ways just to spend my time...

as if he's passing through suffering, through time, through the material world, looking at all the little lives beneath his feet as he sails through all existence. There's a catharsis to Cox singing "Sweetness comes suffering..."

I don't even want to talk about it. I think for truly great music, the best description for the music is the music itself. The words I can spill for this one song aren't particularly useful for enjoying the song.

I will comment on this, though: the song does flip midway, the mood sours, the singer is shot back to earth, back on his couch, and after his celestial journey he mulls on the world. Then, the last verse:

Where do your friends go? Where do they see you? What did you want to be? Ah, shut the hell up, shut your mouth.

Cox's singing that "Shut your mouth" - it's an incredible end to the song, and to the album. It's said with such bitterness and such resignation, and yet I still don't quite understand what effect it has on me. There's just something in the way he sings it that it contains all of these emotions that I can't quite name.

When reflecting on my favorite albums by the year, "Halcyon Digest" has never felt uneasy being 2010's pick. "This Is Happening", LCD Soundsystem's best album (IMO - though "Sound of Silver" (2007) is close), I'm sad to have passed by. After I wrote up the 2010s list, I kicked myself for missing a chance to write up Flying Lotus's "Cosmogramma", which I think is FlyLo's best album (though "You're Dead!" (2014) is also close competition). Amusingly, the closest competitor for 2010 is Chuck Person's (really Oneohtrix Point Never's, really Daniel Lopatin's) "Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1", which is a really special album, having a similar theme as "Halcyon Digest" with an extremely interesting aesthetic.

But whenever I play "Halcyon Digest", it just wins. I haven't researched how Deerhunter conceived this singular record, which is nothing like the records they made before and after. It is so well-balanced in telling what it wants to tell, it is near-perfect in establishing the mood and tone of what it wants to convey, and what it is conveying is something I relate to entirely, that of the cruelty and vicissitudes of time (an interesting sentiment from 28 year olds!). Even listening to it back from the top, I'm amazed by the sonics of Cox playing with the wind in his mouth, as if he's struggling to return to life.

It's interesting too how Deerhunter is categorized under the "indie rock" genre and how "Halcyon Digest" flouts the jangliness and danceability of that music - even when comparing it to their other albums like "Microcastle" (2008) and "Monomania" (2013). Then there's the fact that "Halcyon Digest" is basically the last rock album in my best-of list - if you think my list is indicative of anything (you shouldn't) and unless you count Destroyer (I don't), Deerhunter is the only rock band in my 2010s, which is shocking considering rock's healthy showing in every other decade. Rock only returns in the 2020s, wherein I've already spoken of Hotline TNT's "Cartwheel" (2023).

The 2010s is the great songwriter decade, where the artist, for whatever reason, began to render themselves naked, singing more on personal themes rather than universal, or communal, themes. "Halcyon Digest" is the transition: it's an album where every band member contributed (Cox, Archuleta, Lockett Pundt) but the final work is about loneliness, memory, misery, existence. It almost feels personal, but it's so burnt and stoned out that whatever ego it had is hollowed out. Stylistically it is more obsessed with the texture of its sound more than any other festival act would rationally be; the music was almost approached as if ambient artists made it, a "sculpture" of sound. It's a party for only one person. It is truly singular album, and there's no other choice but for us to simply listen to it.