“Come on down from that cloud / And cast your fears aside,” urges Bradford Cox in the opening bars of the new album from indie beloveds Deerhunter. Gently, dreamily, and with a slight baroque flourish (he is singing over harpsichord – played by fellow winner of alternative hearts Cate Le Bon, no less) we are coaxed into Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?, the band’s eighth album. Cox continues: “You’re all here / And there’s nothing inside / May God’s will be done / In these poisoned hills.” His self-penned linernotes disclose that the song’s title – ‘Death In Midsummer’ – is taken from the caption of a Russian Revolution-era photo he found in a book, depicting people running from piles of dead bodies. Scratch the surface, and from under the beauty of Cox’s music seeps a morbid fascination with oddness and uncertainty.
Throughout, romance is tempered with menace. On ‘No One’s Sleeping’, it’s easy to get caught up in the gorgeous tangle of guitars, synths, and multiple mandolins – you might miss the fact that Cox is singing of “great unrest… in the country there’s much duress / Violence has taken hold.”
The pretty-sounding “orange clouds” of the otherworldly ‘Elemental’ – the most classically Deerhunter-flavoured song on the album – similarly soon reveal themselves to be toxic, “cancer laid out in lines” as a flanging alarm forces everyone inside. The song is intended as “an elegy for ecology” – and indeed, in a week where destruction in California’s Joshua Tree National Park is just the latest of the world’s high-profile ecological horrors, it makes for eerie listening.
But while these songs lament the state of our culture, the crisis of our humanity, our desensitisation, and our lack of care for our planet, each other, and all else that lives on it, they also seem to signal a sort of acceptance. This album isn’t a call-to-arms or doom merchantry, but rather a poetic statement of fact – short stories of and for the anthropocene, the product of a resignation to our inevitable demise. We’re lucky to have got this far, anyway – is it not truly remarkable that everything hasn’t already disappeared?
Why Hasn’t Everything… is a meeting of minds in Cox and Le Bon (who sits not only in the seats of harpsichordist, mandolin player, ‘false’ chorister and lender of Telecaster, but also in that of producer – a fact joyously clear to the ear). And if the end times are upon us, then we may as well appreciate what we can of their strange beauty. As Cox sings on ‘Futurism’: “Your cage is what you make it / If you decorate it / It goes by faster.” I for one am happy to wait out my days, whatever’s left of them, listening to Deerhunter.
