Fluorescent Grey
Deerhunter’s FLUORESCENT GREY EP is the dream existential suicide, insofar as you can commit it / listen to it more than once. There are only four songs, but each is a chemically lucid vignette of hazy psych-sex. Saturated in the sounds of transcendental death, the record plays out as an extended epiphany as good as the calm part of drowning’s meant to be. Words and music repeat out like a mantra; mourning and learning in patterns beyond recognition, over and over, forever delayed towards the post-coital ecstasy of being no more than an object.
Opening track, ‘Florescent Grey’, sets the tone with strung-out guitars and doubled-up vocals spoken as if from behind and in front of a mirror. ‘Patiently, patiently… Patiently’, patiently, intones bandleader Bradford Cox ad nauseum until the song explodes in a whorl of casket dust and blurred lights on rainy windows. Dr Glass jabs the same vein, considering all the world’s ‘Couples kissing’ and ‘Corpses rotting’ in the same phrase, and then there’s ‘Like New’, perhaps this year’s best song to date. This one is inscrutable; for a feeling touchstone combine MURMUR-era REM, Disney’s THE SKELETON DANCE, Alexander Trocchi and psyclocybin.
By Mark Gomes
Release: EP
To Cure: A quiet weekend
Random Entries:
Search our guide to Sydney
Browse our guide to Sydney by interest
Browse our guide to Sydney by keyword
Sydney Events Calendar
Select a date to see what's on in Sydney
Browse our guide to Sydney by weekly issue
Working