Deerhunter
Microcastle/Weird Era Cont.

All across the web, you read (Italian) reviews slightly disgusted by this latest work from Deerhunter.

The usual array of clichés: they're not what they used to be, Cryptograms was so much better, they've become too soft, and so on with the usual boring complaints. Cryptograms was a great album. If you want to listen to that, put that on!

The quality of this new (double) release, as we were saying: if only more albums like this were released! Perhaps the music scene would be less bleak. If only there were more bands like Deerhunter.

The truths that emerge from these two albums are:

• Deerhunter's skill lies in offering us many different facets, in being chameleonic while remaining true to themselves, in scattering fragments of a puzzle that, in light of what is offered between Cryptograms, Microcastle, and Weird Era Cont., appears beautiful. From shoegazing to sixties melodies, from Spacemen 3 to Stereolab, from Krautrock to minimalism.
• The emotion that emerges from Deerhunter's citationist fury (at least the way I hear it) is the joy of making music, a sincere love for albums of the past, for listening and producing music. There's no pretense here, no name-dropping to be fashionable. Jason Cox is sincere. The result is the ability to re-offer us old sounds as if they were new. How? Because this love for music gives us an immense lightness.

If shoegazing emerged as a somewhat dark genre, centered as it was on introspection, on turning inward, Cox's peculiar reinterpretation seems to see it more as opening up to the world, offering himself and offering us his particular inner world filtered through his musical tastes. This also explains the extraordinary prolificacy.

The two albums are very different from each other, Microcastle more oriented towards song form, Weird Era… which delves more into sounds. But both are beautiful. Because Microcastle has great songs (listen to "Nothing Ever Happens...") and Weird Era... has great sounds. Perhaps you might prefer one more in the morning and the other in the evening, one more in autumn and the other in spring. Or vice versa. But in any case, they are two completed works, endowed with meaning, that offer us the image of an artist in a period of great creativity.