One album that’s been shaping the year for me that I haven’t yet found the time (truth be told, the words, really) to write about on here is Atlas Sound’s Let The Blind Lead Those Who See But Cannot Feel. It was released for retail purchase in, I believe, February, but reached these trembling hands a brief bit before Christmas-but only after I’d pledged, on my life, heart, death and soul to not type a single word about the record until it was officially “out there”.
What I found on first listen was the glossy, dreamy haze that haunted (so unexpectedly) Atlas Sound-purveyor Bradford Cox’s proper band (as in, with other living beings), Deerhunter, on their Cryptograms/Fluorescent Grey, being expanded into full-on, blissed out bedroom delay pedal nervous tension.
Well, change of seasons and flights of fancy all have come and gone, and though I’ve been living and loving Bradford’s daydream of a record, I’ve not really written a thing about it. Maybe it’s because I feel that, now, trying to pen 100 words (or more, or less) on a record that’s so in the public consciousness is an exercise in crap-blog futility. Seriously, go to hypemachine, type in “Atlas Sound”, and click on any of the blogs that come up and you’ll probably find a comprehensive guide to squeezing into your skinny jeans while “Recent Bedroom” plays. It’s a symptom of the sea- falling incomprehensibly, indescribably in love with an album means not being able to “blog” about it.
In the same vein tapped by other recent Resonator favorites Blue Screen Love Scene, to my ears and the heart that’s between them Bradford’s solo bedroom work, wrapped in tissue paper and warm summer nights with the windows open, fills a void that the musical landscape’s just beginning to recognize the existence of. Atlas Sound bypasses the dancefloor entirely for the chance to let electronic sounds heal, for a chance at catharsis (from, of and by anything and everything). It’s at-times cobbled together with little more than love and shirtsleeves covered by influences, but the record’s a gorgeous piece of work.
It’s for that reason, then, that it took until I heard the Atlas Sound version of “Blue Moon” for me to find an in to shining some light into the fluorescent grey.
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Scrolling through his oft-updated blog, one will find so many outtakes, demos, and one-off songs recorded under all of Bradford’s various guises that it’s possible (and would be logical) to chalk them all up to embarrassing self-parody. That is, if most of them weren’t so fucking good. This, Bradford’s take of an old standard (one of two on his “Covers Two Songs For My Dad” EP of mp3s), has him removing a lot of the fuzzed Atlas sound and choosing instead his old favorite standbys-the echo and the wash of guitar. He has a voice made for old standard and soul covers, and there are a billiontyseven songs I’d love to hear get the Atlas Sound re-rub; name any Motown classic, for example, and I assure you the Atlas Sound version would jaw-drop, or possibly Bowie’s “Young Americans”. The other note-worthy moment of this song comes at the vamp-til-end, when it conjures up possibly the last unturned touchstone of influence in the drone-haze movement, The Trinity Sessions. Seriously, why did Cowboy Junkies never get signed to 4AD?
The Deerhunter/Atlas Sound blog also has posted a video for the wistful, No Age-as-seen-through-the-lens-of-old-Soul Let The Blind song “Recent Bedroom”:
Atlas Sound- Recent Bedroom from Michael E Palm on Vimeo.
This one’s not one of my favorites on the album, but it is a good tension-builder for the soft, shock then release of what comes as the record builds.
