Atlas Sound: "Danse Infernale/Danse Macabre"

I feel like Bradford Cox’s output, and specifically Atlas Sound’s Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel, gets the short end of CMG’s stick. I’m not sure if he ever claimed to be reinventing the wheel, but for those among us who’re suckers for the occasional sheen and shimmer of bedroom-recorded beauty, it’s enough. Maybe I’ve found myself more interested in Atlas Sound for the way it peels back the already thin skin of Deerhunter’s orange, making even less excuses for privileging the plentiful over the perfect.

So consider these free downloads from Cox’s blog, a Halloween special that tinkles and crackles its way through two underdeveloped ideas with all of the inherent melodiousness and background comfort that music so undemanding implies. The first is a playful skip, clumsily building chimes over a small, semi-distorted sample and keyboard loop; the second ventures a simple beat and, opening that way, pushes the song somewhere repetitive and textural. At their end, neither song finds itself very far from where they began. “Danse Macabre” in particular seems barely enough to be considered anything other than a rough sketch or demo. But each represents, because of their incomplete state, exactly the reason why some of us follow what Cox is doing: the man is bursting with so many ideas he can barely wait to refine them before they enter the world. It’s true that rarely does he seem to release an absolute thought, but the faithful are placing bets that Cox is capable of one day releasing that rare gem of the natural, inspired, planet-aligned perfect song, the sort of song made impossible by the recording processes’ obsessive compulsive desire to revisit and sand away at the edges of the songwriter’s personality.

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