This Can’t Last Too Long

Atlas Sound “The Time I Spent With Nico (Quiet)” – I get the sense that there are are very few days in Bradford Cox’s life when he is not conceiving, writing, recording, or performing music. Add it up: Last year he made an album and an EP with his band Deerhunter. That band toured incessantly and are playing out right now, in advance of a recently-finished record that will come out sometime later this year. On top of that, Cox released an album under the name Atlas Sound, and toured with that band as well. Most interestingly, he has put out enough free EPs and singles as Atlas Sound that Deerhunter seems more like the side project. This restless productivity makes me think of three things:

1) He is rather like Bob Pollard. Not simply because both men are freakishly prolific and have a similar hit-to-miss ratio, but in that the two share an obsessive fascination with the concept of elaborate discographies. Cox may have pragmatically forgone the aura of the object, but he clings to the aesthetic of tossed-off EPs and one-off singles, and like Pollard, takes care to design artwork for even his most minor works. He’s a fan, and he caters to that unending desire for more, more, more. But the thing is, it’s as if he’s his own biggest fan. (Sorry, Marc Hogan!) He’s an obsessive collector of his own art, and as an artist, he’s just trying to keep pace with the demand.

2) He’s burning through material in order to improve at a faster clip. Frankly, more artists should work in this way. One of the most common and useful bits of advice given to writers is that you have to write through all your bad ideas and get them out of your head before you have the experience and self-knowledge necessary to create something truly impressive. The quality of Cox’s work to date, particularly with Deerhunter, has been mostly above average and occasionally sublime, but his free releases have been very hit or miss. That’s not really a problem though. The songs that have been featured on the blog in recent month have included yawn-inducing drones, cover versions, experiments with dub, tributes to favorite artists, deliberate rip-offs, lo-fi piss takes, uninspired shoegazer reveries, and occasionally, absolutely brilliant songs that rank among his finest works to date.

The gentle, sad-eyed quiet version of “The Time I Spent With Nico” certainly falls into that last category. As you can probably glean from the title, it speaks to his fascination with and reverence for the art rock canon. Much like the Scissor Sisters’ brilliant “Paul McCartney,” it seems to be a song about communing with a muse in a dream, and attempting to make sense of the ideas and actions that our unconscious mind attaches to people we consider to be heroes and geniuses. There is also a “loud” version of the song, but it’s not quite as successful, mainly because it strays into one of Cox’s problem areas — a tendency to bury the nuances of his voice beneath louder sounds that do not convey nearly as much emotional detail.

3) He’s writing as much as he can because he’s afraid that he may die very young. This is a very morbid thought, but given Cox’s history and fragile state, he’s probably not wrong to figure that he’s only got so much time to build up his body of work. I definitely get the sense that he’s interested in having a legacy that can be picked apart long after he’s gone, and that he’s probably a bit self-conscious in crafting his work with that in mind. That’s no bad thing. That ambition and willingness to pursue and execute his every creative whim is part of what makes him an artist worth some attention.

(Click here to get the full single, and several other recent free Atlas Sound recordings, at the Deerhunter/Atlas Sound blog.)