Deerhunter/Lower Dens – London, Shepherd’s Bush Empire
March 31, 2011
Part 1 of our 2 part coverage of Deerhunter’s live shows this week:
Deerhunter and Lower Dens are both bands that made significant breakthroughs last year, though they find themselves at quite different stages of their career. Deerhunter have been steadily building a following in the UK since they first emerged properly online with their phenomenal second record Cryptograms and its accompanying EP Fluorescent Grey. 2010’s Halcyon Digest funnelled their less abrasive tendencies into their most reflective, musically adventurous and accessible LP yet. Lower Dens, meanwhile, impressed with their atmospheric debut Twin Hand Movement, skilfully differentiating themselves from a host of bands mining guitar music of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s for inspiration.
Lower Dens
The first thing that becomes apparent about Lower Dens in a live setting is their ability to lock into a particularly tight krauty groove and build their songs from there – their tempos vary subtly and the noise builds and falls in an exceptionally well-paced set. This can mean the focus shifts away from melody at times, but it also helps make the moments when vocals return more prominent. Jana Hunter’s voice in particular is striking, and sounds like it weaves in and out of the hypnotic basslines and washes of noise effortlessly.
Overall, you get a sense that it’s doing Lower Dens a disservice to lump them in with other, obviously revivalist bands, as there’s so much more going on here under the surface. There are elements of Stereolab in their approach to composition (another Bradford Cox favourite), hints at Hunter’s folk past in the melodies and atmospherics, Can rhythms, as well as more obvious debts to bands like Slowdive. It’s exciting to hear where they go next, as they’ve already crafted a sonic palette that hints at so many different possibilities.
Headliners Deerhunter once had the same sense of potential as Lower Dens – though Bradford Cox and co’s early live shows were far more thrilling, unpredictable affairs that could excite and disappoint in equal measure. I found myself reminding myself of their earlier shows as their set got off to a particularly odd start – a new song (albeit a rather fine one) opened the set, and a fantastic cover of Magazine’s ‘The Light Pours Out Of Me’ was thrown in too, early on. ‘Desire Lines’ came second, and was muddied by poor sound. The more casual fans didn’t seem particularly animated, though this could well have been a case of a London crowd being difficult to warm up – hardly a surprise.
Deerhunter
It turns out, I needn’t have worried – Deerhunter knew what they were doing. Microcastle’s ‘Little Kids’ started pleasantly enough, but built into a phenomenal beast of a song; ‘Rainwater Casette Exchane’, a little underwhelming on record, became prettier and fuller in a live setting too. Then came ‘Nothing Ever Happened’ – a fantastic song in its own right, and one the band are always likely to play, but it was stretched beyond its usual limits in its second half, particularly by the band’s more underrated members, Josh Fauver on bass and Moses Archuleta on drums.
As the song took off, Cox added the lyrics from Patti Smith’s ‘Land’. It was a great touch – all the best bands wow you before pointing back to their influences from the past, like an all-knowing older sibling. You get a real sense with Bradford Cox that he completely understands the importance and power of musical lineages for fans – he’s a music obsessive himself of course, unhealthily so – and he’s constantly allowing these extra reference points to filter through his music (partly because he can’t help it) into the ears and heads of his fans. At the same time, he also knows exactly what you want – so ending, either side of the encore, with songs like ‘Helicopter’, ‘Agoraphobia’, ‘He Would Have Laughed’ and ‘Octet’ was bound to send everyone home happy.
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