Everybody's dying just to get the disease. Confidential to the celebs in surgical masks: If there's a real pandemic, we're all already born with it. No, not swine flu, bird flu, monkey pox, SARS, or West Nile virus. Not even anthrax, that post-9/11, pre-Iraq War worry most people appeared to forget overnight. The names of the diseases may change, but the panics they generate all represent the same thing: We're gonna die. And we couldn't be more terrified.
It isn't clear whether My Bloody Valentine will get their long-delayed reissues out before the CD dies; if current patterns hold though, Loveless lovers Deerhunter will have released more than enough spaced-out dominance. Many of their songs change drastically from online demo to final incarnation, but Atlanta's noise-pop lightning rods put it all out there. As with Lil Wayne and his workload, it's as if they sense their time here is limited. Please god, nobody mention Ryan Adams.
Although the total output by Deerhunter and various side projects can be uneven, the full band's official Kranky releases have rarely been less than face-melting. Rainwater Cassette Exchange is the fourth Deerhunter-related release on the label since October-- including last year's Microcastle/Weird Era Cont. album pairing plus guitarist Lockett Pundt's recent debut as Lotus Plaza, The Floodlight Collective-- and it's also maybe the slightest to bear the Deerhunter name. Now you hear it, now you don't. What was I just listening to again?
Except, justifiably, Deerhunter have a pretty big name to live up to at this point. And the more you listen to their latest release, the more it rewards you. Rainwater Cassette Exchange is nothing more-- and nothing less-- than five songs, lasting a total of just more than 15 minutes. Ranging from translucent psych-pop to pummeling garage-rock, they're alternately assured and vulnerable, direct and subtle, light and dark. Their repetitions toe the band's usual thin line between hooks and hypnotism. Through it all, we're haunted by disease and, ultimately, our own inevitable death. So many useless bodies.
As the Fluorescent Grey EP was to Cryptograms, so Rainwater Cassette Exchange is to Microcastle. Most of these songs would make sense packaged as a third piece of vinyl alongside Microcastle/Weird Era Cont., though they have less in common with Weird Era's vast sprawl. Like Microcastle, the new EP-- available digitally now, on CD and vinyl June 22-- was recorded with producer Nicolas Vernhes at Brooklyn's Rare Book Room. Also like Microcastle, Rainwater Cassette Exchange shifts between delicate 1960s-pop tunefulness and fist-pumping dopamine surges.
"I wanted Microcastle and Weird Era to be a Fall/Winter record," Bradford Cox once wrote in a blog post that has since been deleted. Among the last sounds you'll hear on the current EP is a child's cry of "trick or treat." Whether it's lilting melodies, some new-and-improved vocal harmonies, or Strokes-cum-Magazine stately clangor, Rainwater Cassette Exchange makes with the treats first. Then, as much as Cox likes to downplay the band's lyrics, you notice the ghostly stuff, the warnings of impending mortality. Autumnal material, yeah, but its bleak truths resonate all the more against the budding spring weather outside.
First, the treats. The title track opens the EP with girl-group sugar that helps the reverb-heavy overdrive go down. "Do-oooh-oooh you believe in love at first sight?" Cox sings, his voice beatific, his lyric Beatles-y ("With a Little Help From My Friends", last verse, first line). Three songs-- "Disappearing Ink", "Famous Last Words", and "Circulation"-- are propulsive garage-rock anthems in the style of Microcastle marquee moment "Nothing Ever Happened". The only other track, the lonesome "Game of Diamonds", started life on Deerhunter's blog, where it was drenched in shoegaze distortion. Here it gets a softer arrangement featuring piano and acoustic guitar-- all the better to hear Cox's uniquely engaging vocals, clear and frail and fricative.
It all sounds so harmless, it's a treat to find out we're actually getting tricked. "Rainwater Cassette Exchange" is sort of like Microcastle's "Agoraphobia", had that song's erotically asphyxiated protagonist already been dead, or its arrangement paradoxically sprightlier. "Famous Last Words" opens with a lyric about "your brother bleeding" on the sidewalk, while a wobbly Theremin adds to the eerie October mood. Despite putting an Everly Brothers-esque vocal duet over distorted guitar lines, "Circulation" is about "bad" circulation, and Cox has a heart condition. "Hands reach for my light when it gets dark," it sounds like he's saying, right before the song veers off into two minutes of bittersweet sound collage around where the live version becomes draped with ethereal vocal loops.
If Rainwater Cassette Exchange sounded evanescent to me on first listens, well, so are we. "Time never meant that much to me," Cox sings on "Game of Diamonds", but that's belied not only by Deerhunter's work ethic, but also by words that Cox's emotionally isolated narrator-- Jens Lekman's "It Was a Strange Time in My Life" comes to mind-- repeats elsewhere in the song: "I've counted every grain of sand." Like, our endless numbered days. When Cox sings about lying drunk on the Bowery, it's hard for me not to think of that night he rambled endlessly and flouted New York's smoking laws at the Bowery Ballroom. That stuff'll kill ya, you know.
So what do you think is gonna happen to us now? Are we gonna get younger, happier, prettier? "Nothing can be changed," goes "Famous Last Words", but that isn't exactly true. Consider "Disappearing Ink" a metaphor for the temporariness of it all, and for what's permanent: "Disappearing ink, but the words still sting." After you play a good song, it's gone in the air, but you can still feel it. After you type something stupid on the internet, you can try to delete it, but you can't take it back. That means you and I are gonna live forever. Now those would be famous last words.
