Deerhunter: Fading Frontier (4AD)
Seventh studio album from the hard-to-pin-down Atlanta band whose rolling membership has included friends, helpmates and members of other groups and who have toured with both noise monsters Lightning Bolt and whimsical indie-rock veterans The Flaming Lips. Fading Frontier sees them coalesce around what is more or less their founding quartet for a suite of songs covering all the bases, from roiling indie-pop to trippy psychedelia and Big Star-style harmonising.
Guests include the British pair of Tim Gane and James Cargill of (respectively) Stereolab and Broadcast. Like Deerhunter, who lost an early member to a head injury caused by a skateboarding accident, both those bands have had members die. Meanwhile Deerhunter's frontman Bradford Cox was seriously injured late last year when he was hit by a car in Atlanta: he recounts the episode in the woozily beautiful Breaker and both death and the transience of life are themes he picks up elsewhere. Deerhunter certainly aren't iconoclasts – Cox has spoken in interviews of his reverence for bands like Stereolab, Sonic Youth and Radiohead – but they're clearly intent on cutting their own path.
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