"I'm off the grid/I'm out of range," Deerhunter's Bradford Cox sings on his band's seventh record. Agreed: No one spaces out like these Atlanta shoegazers and masters of distracted guitar poesy. Fading Frontier follows 2013's dark-hued Monomania with a brighter, freer dream rock. It's their most eclectic album, from the pacific Sixties psych drift of "Duplex Planet" to the slurry, Blur-y "Snakeskin" to the warm synth-pop ooze of "Take Care," where Cox, who recently survived a serious car accident, advises, "Raise your crippled hand." The elliptically pretty music often summons a sense of escape and freedom that's ringed with ambiguity. On "All the Same," the guitars hover in the watery middle distance as Cox sings about the transgender epiphany of a friend's parent: "No more wife/No more kids/Nothing left to live with." For Deerhunter, life is always being lived station to station.
rollingstone
Fading Frontier
Deerhunter (2015)
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Other reviews of Fading Frontier
metacritic
fantano
Atlanta indie outfit Deerhunter returns with a high-fidelity album that's a bit of a mixed bag.
exclaim
On Fading Frontier, Deerhunter focus on their ability as a band to hypnotize and confound, which make the explosive moments here stand out that much more.
thelineofbestfit
Deerhunter have nearly, but not quite, made their classic rock album
pitchfork
After the grotty, pissed-off Monomania and Bradford Cox's catastrophic car accident comes Deerhunter's most content, warm and plainspoken work to date. While the band's written many indelible songs, Fading Frontier may have their first that could conceivably blend into real-deal classic rock radio.
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