Halcyon Digest

Eleven tracks in about forty-six minutes, and the subtractive test finds no padding. Earthquake must open: it wakes the record into its haze, the past entered as a slow dream. Desire Lines is the centre, the one place the record breaks into open motion, and its coda is required as release. Helicopter is the record’s darkest story and its clearest song. He Would Have Laughed must close, an elegy that lets the record end on a person rather than a mood. Revival and Coronado give the record its brief brightness. The test bites at Sailing, which drifts on almost nothing and restates Earthquake’s mood more thinly, and lightly at Memory Boy and Fountain Stairs, which pass without changing the record’s course. The frame and the centre are compelled; three tracks are slighter than the rest.

Score: 8.5 / 10

What the record brings into the open can be stated: memory edits the past into consolation, and the halcyon days are a digest, a fonder version made after the fact; under the haze are isolation, unspoken desire and the dead. Sound carries this as fully as words, and is credited so: songs in the forms of the 1950s and 1960s, doo-wop and early rock and roll, heard as if through a wall or a worn tape, which is what remembering does to the past. Helicopter gives the clearest disclosure, a young man used and thrown away, set to a lovely chiming arrangement; He Would Have Laughed holds a real grief. The words are oblique and set low, and the condition, nostalgia’s falseness, is felt more than articulated.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Elevation is real, of a warm, hazy kind, and comes on about half the record. Desire Lines is the summit: a modest song that gives way to a long guitar coda over a pressing beat, the two guitars climbing and circling until the haze becomes motion, transport sustained. He Would Have Laughed rises slowly across its length into a chiming close that is both elegy and release. Helicopter lifts on its bell-like figures, beauty laid over a cruel story. Earthquake has a drifting, suspended height; Coronado a brief brass exultation. The rest has charm more than height. The register holds the figure: the voice is blurred by design, and the height comes as reverie, seldom as grandeur or terror, on five or six of eleven tracks.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Myth is evoked often and built at one point. The title evokes the halcyon, the kingfisher of the old story whose nesting calmed the winter sea, and the calm days named for it: a myth of peace that the record turns into memory’s lie, and that governs how every song is heard. Revival evokes the tent meeting and the saved soul. Helicopter comes nearest to building, a boy cast down from the sky, Icarus without the wings, his fall set as a lullaby. Memory Boy and Basement Scene evoke adolescence as a lost country. He Would Have Laughed gives a particular person, a dead friend, and keeps him particular. The patterns are glimpsed through the haze rather than carried across the sequence, and the halcyon frames the record more than it structures it.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The inheritance is Deerhunter’s own records, the ambient drift and noise of Cryptograms (2007) and the cleaner songs of Microcastle (2008), and behind them shoegaze, krautrock’s pulse, the pop of the early 1960s and the drifting home recordings of their indie contemporaries. The turn is toward clarity: songs in the plainest old forms, doo-wop, a saxophone rock and roll, a chiming ballad, played straight and then blurred by production into memory. That is a real choice and a coherent one, a band known for drift committing to the song. What holds it: Microcastle had already turned toward the song, the haze was a sound the indie field of 2010 shared widely, and the move toward clear song was also a move toward the larger audience.

Score: 8.1 / 10

Change the form and much of what the record knows goes. A record about memory’s editing is built of old song forms heard through distance: the doo-wop and the rock and roll are not pastiche but recollection, the shape intact and the detail worn away. The blurred voice, set into the mix rather than in front, is part of this: a remembered voice, not a present one. Desire Lines enacts the escape from memory into motion, and its coda is the only place the record looks forward. The sequence is counted here, once: from Earthquake’s waking into the past to He Would Have Laughed’s grief, the record moves from a general haze to a particular loss. The haze is one device, applied to every song, and Sailing, Memory Boy and Fountain Stairs sit in the form without enacting it.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Evidence is short, sixteen years, and the figure is a forecast. The record is returned to by its listeners, and the production yields on close hearing: the layered guitars of Desire Lines separate into their parts, the treated drums of Earthquake hold more than their first drift, and the chiming figures of Helicopter and He Would Have Laughed reward attention. The obliquity of the words invites return, though some of what is found there is projection invited by blur, as with every record that withholds statement. The meaning is a mood, and moods deepen on return less than meanings do; the formal depth is in texture more than in structure; and the return the record receives is real but chiefly within one audience.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The field is indie and alternative rock around 2010. The intrinsic force: the record joined the ambient and noise haze of its moment to classic song form with unusual finish, and showed that the haze could serve memory rather than only texture. That refines a direction rather than reorganising possibility; the synthesis of drift and old pop was a shared project of its scene, worked at the same time by its contemporaries. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record was widely praised in its year and is placed high in lists of its decade within indie criticism, and Desire Lines is still played; no clear line of records took its method from it rather than from the scene it belonged to, and its reach outside indie listeners is narrow.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Survival is weighed over sixteen years, on form, presence and fabric. The form is whole: the album survives as released, in print and streamed. Presence is continuous but narrow: the record is known chiefly within indie listening and criticism, and no song has passed into wide use. The fabric is partly fixed to its moment: the reverb and tape haze, the treated drum machine and the blurred voice are a production signature shared by much indie music of 2008 to 2012, the surface this axis penalises, though the old song forms under it date slowly. Narrow presence and a period surface are what hold the figure under the usual step for its span.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, and the making is load-bearing where it counts. Ben H. Allen’s production holds a dense, hazed sound legible: the two guitars of Desire Lines interlock and climb without smearing, the chimes of Helicopter sit clean over its wash, the saxophone of Coronado cuts through. Lockett Pundt’s guitar work is the record’s finest single craft; Moses Archuleta’s drumming drives the coda of Desire Lines and stays out of the way elsewhere; Bradford Cox’s voice is placed into the mix, a choice that carries the argument. The faults fall on a share of the record: the burial of the voice sometimes loses more than it means, Sailing and Fountain Stairs are thin in arrangement, Earthquake’s drum machine is a period sound, and the palette is narrow.

Score: 8.2 / 10

One law governs the record: the past heard through memory’s haze, made sweeter and less exact than it was, with loss beneath. The two most distant elements obey it. Coronado, brisk rock and roll with a saxophone, and Sailing, a near-silent drift, are the same remembering, once of a bright day and once of an empty one. Helicopter’s cruelty and Basement Scene’s sweetness share one wash, and that is the point: memory treats them alike. Pundt’s two songs differ in voice from Cox’s and obey the same law, which is the band’s achievement. The range of form runs from doo-wop and rock and roll to ambient drift, a driving coda and a chiming elegy. The tonal range is held narrow by the production, one haze over everything; the coherence is in the law, not the narrowness.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, as memory and its editing. Adolescence and desire are held, glimpsed through the haze. Death is held in He Would Have Laughed, a particular friend, and in Helicopter, a stranger’s death as an image of use and disposal. The sacred is evoked once, in Revival. The body appears in Helicopter’s violence. What holds this axis lowest of the twelve: the family, labour, the state, history and the natural order are absent or a word; the orders that are present lie close together inside one consciousness’s remembering; and the record does not join them so much as wash them in one light. A small form holding what it holds, and the figure describes it.

Score: 7.4 / 10