The Hometown Hottness: Atlas Sound
photo by Biggie C
Last week we caught the Atlas Sound show at The Drunken Unicorn (2/19/08). For those who don’t know yet, Atlas Sound is the solo project of Deerhunter’s Bradford Cox. He just released his first full-length album, Let The Blind Lead those Who Can See But Cannot Feel, but it is far from the first material he has put out under the Atlas Sound name. On his blog, Cox regularly puts out material he makes over a weekend, or old stuff he did when he was a kid, or all sorts of interesting music available to everyone for free. To me, his blog is a revolutionary medium for musicians. While there certainly have been plenty of extremely prolific artists before him, Bradford is able to have a much more intimate experience with his audience, regularly giving away his material to his fans directly, and so far, there is no one else who is pulling this off so successfully. As the Internet continues to steer the world of music into interesting directions, Mr. Cox has embraced these trends and utilized them to enhance his art.
What’s even better is that almost all of his material that I have listened to in this way is good. I’m still jamming out the Orange Ohms Glow EP constantly that he put on his site weeks ago. The new proper LP is stunning too, a very different beast than Cryptograms.
For the live shows, Bradford has put together a nice collection of musicians to form the Atlas Sound Music Group. He came on stage repping a No Age T-shirt. Another thing I love about him is how he manages to team up with and support many of the other great new musicians in their prime right now. The Atlas Sound performance struck me very differently than the many Deerhunter shows I caught last year. When writers talk about Bradford, they aways bring up things like the dress wearing and all of the supposedly obscene blogging he was doing last year. He is always billed as a spectacle because of this and he sort of became a polarizing figure. While I’m sure that many of the things he did also functioned as attention grabbers, it always felt like they were more about forming a barrier of inaccessibility between him and the audience. As if it were more a distraction from the fear of putting himself and his work out their in an honest and naked way for all to see. Even at the end of the year when he ditched most of the stage act, he would always feel distant on stage, and this Atlas Sound show was the first time to me that he seemed to have a very inviting demeanor and open up. He seems to be more comfortable with putting all of his being on display and for a fan like me, it was pretty amazing to see.
Biggie C got some photos:
I got some videos, “Recent Bedroom” (I love this song so much):
“Quarantined”:
“Scraping Past”:
“Winter Vacation”:
“Requiem For All The Lonely Teenagers With Passed Out Moms”:
Sloan Simpson taped the entire show and you can find that here at Southern Shelter.
Deerhunter/Atlas Sound/Lotus Plaza Blog
Bonus: White Rainbow
White Rainbow is is on tour with Atlas Sound, in fact the one man loop-fest badass is in the Atlas Sound Music Group. His set was really cool too, you can listen to it at Southern Shelter also. A couple pics from Biggie C:
- Posted by Davy Minor on February 28, 2008 at 10:17 am
