Deerhunter: don't go with the flow

For the last few years, the industrious thirty-year-old rocker Bradford Cox with - "God”, according to some media – has been making a big impression with the guitar pop of his solo project Atlas Sound and the indie rock group Deerhunter.

Deerhunter, a fivesome from Atlanta, Georgia has just released its sixth album, Monomania. Being contrarian, wilful, and headstrong, Cox has steered the group away from the dreamy, sixties-influenced indie-pop sensibilities of their last two albums, Halcyon Digest and Microcastle. Cox rattles the guitars in the same grimy, garage rock style as Black Lips, also from Atlanta, or spills ramshackle riffs like Pavement did in the 1990s. His voice often sounds like it was recorded in a cardboard box.

Does Cox just do what he likes? Or is it because the band has been reshuffled over the last few years? Bassist Josh Fauver left, and Lockett Pund, the most important songwriter after Cox, only wrote one track for this record. The whole thing sounds completely uncomplicated, as though Cox, the eternal outsider, wants to liberate himself from the enormous expectations of music critics and fanatical fans. Cox has been reconnecting with his punk-rock and garage-rock past, and trying to put rock 'n' roll back on the map – though he’s the first person to deny it.

Being deliberately incomprehensible, Cox said the following about it in Rolling Stone during the run-up to the album release: “It’s a nocturnal garage record. I’ll tell you this. It’s a very avant-garde rock ‘n’ roll record”. It’s no coincidence that the album’s title refers to a mental disorder that manifests itself in one single abnormal tendency or one single delusion, without necessarily affecting any other mental processes. Rock ‘n’ roll seems to be becoming tamer lately. Good thing someone isn’t going with the flow.

Deerhunter 21/5, 20.00, €16/19, ANCIENNE BELGIQUE, boulevard Anspachlaan 110, Brussel/Bruxelles, 02-548.24.24, www.abconcerts.be