Deerhunter: Halcyon Digest [4AD]

Why you'll love it

This 4AD LP comes with a download card. Halcyon Digest drew a Metacritic score of 86, came third in Pitchfork's best albums of 2010 and made 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.

This edition

• Download card included
• Original 11-track album

About the album

Bradford Cox said the title was about the way we edit our memories into a digest of what we'd like to remember, real or invented. That idea runs all through Deerhunter's fifth album, a record that sounds like faded photographs, half-remembered radio and the romance people attach to the past.

The band made it at Chase Park Transduction in Athens, Georgia, with producer Ben H. Allen and engineer David Barbe. "Revival" is a bright, acoustic-strummed rush, "Desire Lines" stretches into a long, glistening guitar coda, "Helicopter" floats on a bed of chimes and drift, and "Coronado" adds a saxophone strut. The band promoted it with photocopied flyers that fans pinned up around their towns. Cox recorded the closing "He Would Have Laughed" on his own as a tribute to his friend Jay Reatard.

George Mitchell's cover photo, taken at Atlanta's Star Lite Lounge on New Year's Eve 1982, was chosen because it felt connected to songs like "Basement Scene." Cox called the album "a collection of short dispatches"; it's the one newsletter in the shop nobody has ever unsubscribed from.

Also at Kops: more Deerhunter on vinyl · browse Alternative

Tracklist

Listen

On 4AD (cat# CAD 3X38), the 2010 album.