Atlas sound is Bradford Cox, front man of Deerhunter. He has said of this project that it was started because he had 'ideas that I can't make work with a five piece rock band'. Well this isn't a million miles away from his day job - heavily filtered and treated guitars, keyboards and percussion loops intertwine in a desolate yet engulfing fashion.
The whole album boasts a scorched beauty and ethereal (term over used I know) presence, less an aural assault more an aural soothing. No more is this present than on ‘On Guard’, a tune so gentle and beautiful it would send a baby to sleep on a barbed wire fence.
Despite the ghostly quality of the album, Cox also manages to conjure up an optimism rarely found on such recordings. Listen to ‘Winter Vacation’ and tell me you didn't think for just a minute, maybe there was a chance that The Hoosiers were simply an awful nightmare and you would soon awaken, taking in a sharp breath as you were brought back to life. This sensation also features heavily on ‘Cold As Ice’, where you are suddenly snapped out of a dream like state by the wall of sound sharply falling back into a subdued refrain.
‘...Blind..’ features so many layers that build into a scintillating cacophony that it demands repeated listens. Take ‘Quarantined’ with its glorious drum loops and manipulated guitar sounds, ending like a transistor radio drifting in and out of focus, until it finally fades away. Ok, so the template is pretty much the same all the way through: take one lyric, repeat over and over again, build eerie guitar and keyboard noise, end. But there are so many elements swirling around each other that it never gets tiresome. This will continue to fill us with the joys of spring long after the ATP hangover!
Top Tracks: 'Winter Vacation', 'Quarantined'.
(Re)Released 05/05/08 on Kranky Records