A Light That Burned Me

Deerhunter “Death In Midsummer”

“Death In Midsummer” has an unusually crisp sound for Deerhunter, a band more accustomed to an artful soft-focus aesthetic. A lot of this comes down to the way the verses are guided by a taut rhythm and the clean, trebly tone of the harpsichord. The song moves along for nearly three minutes before shifting into a cathartic guitar solo section that sounds like Bradford Cox doing what he can to channel the sci-fi tones of Robert Fripp. It’s a very graceful and confident piece of music, and it moves the band into a more elegant aesthetic while retaining all of the most essential elements of their sound going back to the harsher, more goth tones of Cryptograms and Microcastle. The pace of Cox’s work has slowed down drastically over the years – this new album comes four years after the last one, and this is a guy who put out five full-length albums and an EP in the space of 2008 and 2009 – but if his art is becoming more carefully composed and refined, that’s a fair trade off.

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