Atlas Sound: Let The Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel

Yes folks, another dream pop / post rock / shoegaze outfit with a ridiculously long title for an album; Atlas Sound is the moniker for Deerhunter’s Bradford James Cox, and is a container for what you would presume would be his more self-indulgent side project stuff that isn’t as good as the material he produces in the band. That’s right in the first aspect, but wrong in the second. Bradford Cox seems to be somebody that we want to know after all.

You see, what I wasn’t expecting from the album was that it would actually be as good, if not better than the sloppy but shimmering work of Deerhunter. The opening track sets the Pitchfork Media friendly stall out; a badly recorded child struggling through an anecdote about a ghost over a glazed, distant-sounding synthesiser. The ambient opener also acts as an entrance into a womb. Before you think I’m getting too weirdly Freudian, let me explain:

Genres fixated on youth, innocence and love include Bradford Cox’s beloved shoegaze movement, epitomised by the muffled female vocals, loud, reverberated guitars and simple melodies of My Bloody Valentine and, to a lesser extent, Slowdive, Ride, and a number of less prestigiously reverb drenched, maudlin others. Lyrics are self-consciously artful, sparse, and incomprehensible, and the aim appears to be to offer comfort and solace to the newly born adolescent terrified of the harsh and hateful world in which he or she arrived as an alien. I don’t know whether that’s pretentious or not, but heard words reverberated through the walls of a womb as blood rushes all around, and the experience of a My Bloody Valentine gig don’t seem too far removed from one-another. Perhaps art is all about regression after all; Mr. Freud was right.

Of course, innumerable ambient albums have attempted to push this theory ad nauseum, from ambient electronica’s strange, and from what I can gather, subconscious insistence on BPMs that match the human heart beat, to the hypnotic noise work of our Krautrock gurus. I guess what separates the snowflakes from the slush is the content rather than the form, innit?

To accentuate my thesis, lyrics about movement to and from rooms and enclosed spaces pepper the album. “Recent Bedroom” starts with the simple verse: “I walked outside / I walked outside / I could not cry / I don’t know I don’t know why” which sounds like an adequate reconstruction of the adolescent desire to return to the state of a weeping child in the face of a meaningless and monstrous outdoor world. The song is sweetly helpless. Similarly, “Cold as Ice” starts with “walk into back room… back room… back room. Cold as ice.” Simple lyrics and songwriting are kept alive by a beautifully fragile vocalisation set against a sparse, repeated backdrop. It doesn’t take too great a stretch of the imagination to link all of this walking about to being shoved through birth canals, and the whole thing being a kind of primal scream for mother to take him home, but then maybe by liberal arts education is getting the better of me again.

I could bang on about Bradford Cox’s oft-publicised adolescent troubles, but I doubt that would matter. Sure, he’s articulating a deep, anxiety-fused pain here, but that doesn’t necessarily make a good album. However, an impeccably sparse and discerning ear for production, melody and lyrics do, and keep these scraps from his personal sketchbook from falling into either introspective thumb-twiddling or generic confessional singer-songwriter dirge. Twinkly xylophones, arpeggios and dense reverberated harmony falsettos punctuate the general wash of noise. Most important, Cox’s unaffected, touching vocals seep through the swamp. Poignantly offset against the synthesised world that he balefully ruminates in, “Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel” feels like part-sketchbook, part-novel, and negotiates that tricky artistic terrain of making the private public in ways that sets this apart from your traditional singer-songwriter confessional stuff. Plus, it made me feel strangely nostalgic for a time I can’t quite put my finger on.

Tags: Atlas Sound, Bradford Cox, Deerhunter, Let The Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel, Review