A Deerhunter album rollout usually coincides with some pithy and provocative statements from Bradford Cox on pop culture. He sort of obliged on Fading Frontier, calling most modern pop music "totally unredeemable" in an interview. But other than that, he seemed serene: "Fifteen years I spent proving myself," he mused in that same piece. "The only reason for me to make a record now is to make the record." Accordingly, after the grotty, pissed-off Monomania and Cox's catastrophic car accident comes Deerhunter's most content, warm and plainspoken work to date.
Cox drew an "influence map" for this record, one which included R.E.M., Tom Petty, and INXS. All of these names together clarify something about Cox's intentions: These are amongst the most agreeable rock artists to ever become stars, and Fading Frontier sounds like Deerhunter attempting to create songs that are equally enjoyable in an objective way as "Free Fallin'" or "Need You Tonight" or "The One I Love"—ones where if you hear them in a restaurant or car or house party, no one will ever ask you to turn them off. While Deerhunter's created a number of indelible songs over their career, Fading Frontier may have their first that could conceivably blend into real-deal classic rock radio.
Deerhunter reunite with Halcyon Digest producer Ben H. Allen, who forgoes his trademark aquatic ambience and booming low-end to approximate the embossed sound of Jeff Lynne or Scott Litt on "Breaker" and "Living My Life". Even compared to the contemporary indie rock elite working with late-'80s pop-rock at the moment, Fading Frontier sounds happily centrist. Opener "All the Same" shares a title with a Real Estate song, as well as their chiming, interlocked guitars and chipper melodic resolutions. The waltz-timed number with tinny drum machine and slide guitar also happens to share a title with Beach House ("Take Care"). These are crisp and professional recordings, midtempo strides with cleanly strummed open chords, broad harmonies and hooks, unbeholden to any particular subgenre or time period. Meanwhile, the harpsichord and high-capoed guitars of "Duplex Planet" and "Carrion" show a clearheaded psychedelic side of Deerhunter that's more Paisley Underground than Velvet Underground.
Cox has called Fading Frontier his "domestic" record, but you shouldn't expect a facade of contentment: "All the Same" finds Cox turning his attention to a friend's father, who "changed his sex and had no more" out of boredom and loses his wife, kids and will to live as a result. Meanwhile, the foggy ambience of "Take Care" parts to reveal Cox singing about burnt dry ice and rotting corpses. The title is not a tender promise, it's a sarcastic, suicidal salutation. Even if Cox hadn't spent much of the past year in recovery, Fading Frontier would likely still obsess over mortality; this is a Deerhunter record, after all, and so we end up with sturdy, industrious pop-rock songs about creeping death, survival and revival. Cox has urged us not to confuse "I" with me," but has spent a significant portion of his life in and out of hospitals, and both "Snakeskin" and "Duplex Planet" feel inspired by his convalescence." I don't ever want to go back again to the old folks' home," he sighs on the latter, and it feels like an echo of the riddle he posed on Halcyon Digest's "Basement Scene,'" where he claimed, "I don't want to get old" and "I want to get old".
Perhaps he did mean both. Note the play on words of the closer "Carrion", or hell, the double meaning of "remains". If it doesn't initially seem like there's as much at stake as there was on Halcyon Digest or the singleminded commitment of Monomania, Fading Frontier is Cox reckoning with the dissonance of being relatively young man of 33 with a band who's already in legacy-building phase*.* But the tough talk on "Snakeskin" comes from someone whose mere physicality is considered a major health risk and confrontational by default ("I was born already nailed to the cross"). If there isn't a Deerhunter sound, there's a Deerhunter perspective that runs through their work, best summed up in "All the Same"—"take your handicaps/ Channel them and feed them back/ Until they become your strengths." The weird era continues.
