Deerhunter: "Breaker"
Deerhunter aren’t looking back anymore. The Atlanta band’s biggest breakthrough to date, 2010′s Halcyon Digest, became an outsider rock album worthy of obsession in part by hearkening back to a time when such things were more commonplace. Their 2013 follow-up showed how obsession can turn into, well, Monomania, subverting the band’s own success with a set of songs that were at once messier (the sludge that cakes “Leather Jacket II”) and more straightforward (the down-home shuffle of “Pensacola”). The LP’s cinematic approach to lo-fi recording techniques prompted the Black Lips to call it “transcend-fi.” On “Breaker”, all that washes away, almost literally.
Where the recent “Snakeskin” achieved a gawky funkiness we’d never quite heard from Deerhunter before, “Breaker” is, in a subtle sense, the closest they’ve come to beach-blanket pop. Lyrically, the “undertows” that guitarist Lockett Pundt described on Halcyon anthem “Desire Lines” have given way to the “waves,” “ocean,” and “tide.” Produced with Halcyon collaborator Ben H. Allen, the track is a splash of clear water sonically, too, its dreamy verses crashing into a jangling chorus where Pundt and Cox sing in harmony for the first time. Cox sings of death and Christ—themes present in his songs since the early days—but here, amid possible references to Cox’s being hit by a car in 2014, he sounds at peace.
Together, Pundt and Cox could be two Wilson brothers from a state drenched with humidity; the synth-led instrumental interlude glints idyllically. If the video for the song submerges Cox and Pundt (along with drummer Moses Archuleta and bassist Josh McKay) in mesmerizing visual overlays, they’re still gazing forward and not resisting the current.
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