Keepin' Up The Good Work

Artist: Atlas Sound

Album: Logos

Year: 2009

Grade: 3.5 pretzels

I was late to jump on the Deerhunter bandwagon. While various chunks of the music community immediately attached themselves to the Atlanta-based band’s dreamy, meandering sound, it took me a couple of years (and a very impressive live show) to see the quality songwriting hiding beneath all the shoegaze-lite guitar strumming. Over the past six months, I’ve cracked one of the many musical mysteries I’ve been trying to solve, meaning this is the perfect time for me to hear Logos, the second solo album from Deerhunter’s frontman, Bradford Cox.

Again recorded under the moniker Atlas Sound, Logos is a considerably more coherent and unified work than last year’s Let The Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel. Even more organic and babbling than Deerhunter, Cox’s solo songs strip away most of the shimmering guitars in favor of warm acoustic guitar strumming, supplemented by layered keyboards and minimal, efficient drumming. This fairly skeletal sound reveals the songs’ odd twists and turns, featuring all kinds of pleasantly atonal details floating through the mix.

Of course, the downside to this style (and all of Deerhunter’s work, for that matter), is that the songs can get so wispy that they threaten to float right out the window. Roughly half of Logos compensates for this with winning melodies or other compelling elements, but “Kid Klimax” or “Criminals” will pass by unnoticed if you’re not careful. The songs aren’t exactly boring, but they don’t draw attention to themselves. The album’s highest points, including the endlessly hummable “Sheila” and the squelchy “Walkabout” (featuring Animal Collective’s Noah Lennox), are the songs that force the listener to interact with them in some way.

Logos is very good by the usual solo album standards. It has its own distinctive qualities that separate it from Cox’s work in Deerhunter, while still retaining enough similarities that fans should embrace it pretty much wholeheartedly. It also features a handful of truly memorable songs, which rank among some of the most enjoyable indie pop in years. The other songs do let the album down somewhat, but I’m not going to kick the proverbial gift horse in the mouth, here. “Walkabout” alone justifies this album’s existence and it’s nice to see Cox maintain his insanely rapid rate of new music releases.