Monomania
Deerhunter’s 2010 opus *Halcyon Digest* captures the dream-pop savants at their most elegant and fragile, but on their follow-up album, *Monomania*, Bradford Cox and company rediscover their scuzzy punk roots. “Neon Junkyard” rattles out of its cage with inhuman vocal contortions while “Pensacola” straddles over a hooky cowpunk guitar riff. The noisy title track cranks up the volume further and further, drowning out Cox’s screeching vocals with a torrential downpour of twisted feedback.
On Deerhunter’s swaggering fifth album, Monomania, they almost completely jettison the dreamy ambience that usually characterizes their work in favor of straight-up raw, bleeding garage rock, populating the songs with junkyards, leather jackets, and motorcycles.
Monomania, the fifth studio full-length album from Atlanta art-punk band Deerhunter begins not with bang, but a croak. Following a few seconds of guitar interplay, frontman Bradford Cox howls a little before “Neon Junkyard” kicks into proper gear, then sings, “Finding the fluorescence in the junk / By night…
Deerhunter set up uncharacteristically straightforward confines only to mock their self-set boundaries from within.
Don’t blink—no mere mid-career album, Monomania registers as an absolute impact event, a massive dirty blast marking the…
Before Monomania's release, Deerhunter described the album's music as "nocturnal garage" -- an accurate, if somewhat elliptical, nutshell explanation of what Bradford Cox and crew (who include new bassist Josh McKay and additional guitarist Frankie Broyles) are up to on this set of songs. After Halcyon Digest's nostalgic haze and the fragile beauty of Atlas Sound's Parallax, it seemed that Cox was drifting further away from the rawness of his early days. He breaks away from this insular turn on Monomania -- to a point.
Having operated amongst a mire of genres within their self-proclaimed ‘ambient punk’ label, fans of Atlanta quintet Deerhunter should hold no truck with the direction sixth album Monomania takes. After the soporific and nostalgic tone of 2010’s Halcyon Digest, it stands as something of a wake-up call, full of scuzzy garage riffs and heavily treated, lo-fi vocals
Deerhunter have always sought to make uncompromising rock music that splits its time between atmospheric psychedelia, simple pop songs and anarchic noise.
Bradford Cox has long maintained that music is for all intents and purposes his boyfriend. Often classifying himself as asexual, he's asserted that a relationship would convolute his single-minded pursuit of music.
Deerhunter's sixth album is a whistlestop tour of rock'n'roll styles, writes <strong>Killian Fox</strong>
Monomania is frustratingly disheveled, its numerous coarse spots in need of some serious polishing.
Now his band is on its sixth album, Bradford Cox gets to do what Bradford Cox wants – and we all have to get used to it, says <strong>Michael Hann</strong>
Deerhunter - Monomania review: Listening to Monomania is like looking through a scrapbook that reflects on Deerhunter's history, their influences, and even gives hints of where they might go next.