#microcastle

Everyone knows this story, right?  Deerhunter record Microcastle, Microcastle leaks, Deerhunter secretly records Weird Era Continued to accompany the physical release, Weird Era Continued (and Atlas Sound’s Logos) leaks too, everyone’s kinda miffed about it.  Still, both get released ten years ago, and Microcastle is one of the Albums of the Year, and Weird Era is

also there

And maybe it’s because I’m looking back at it now, and maybe I’m missing something.  But it always felt like people give this short shrift.  And to be fair, Microcastle does have the one-two opening salvo of “Cover Me Slowly”/“Agoraphobia”, and the storm of “Nothing Ever Happened”, and the other storm of “Twilight at Carbon Lake”, and really it’s a flawless post-pop record front-to-back unless you’re not a fan of “Activa” and its cousins—but I didn’t know that.

I wouldn't hear Microcastle until 2011.  My dad, who’d caught Cryptograms when it came out, bought Weird Era, and only Weird Era, online back in ‘08.  I was eleven. I wouldn’t know about its mirrortwin until after Halcyon Digest.  In other words, I heard Weird Era Continued in a vacuum.

And this is important, because, barring some brief, forgotten experiences with Heaven and Las Vegas, …And Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out and maybe The Campfire Headphase (good god my dad was/is hip), this was my first experience with dreampop or shoegaze, and one of my first with indie rock. 

Guitarist Lockett Pundt would go on to say that the album was made with a a haunted vibe in mind, and I see that, and I love it.  The whole album echoes.  Guitars and pianos meld into a crackling quicksilver.  Voices fade in and out, unintelligible, washed.  Waves of noise crash against the rhythms—and the rhythms are on point too!  The Fauver-Archuleta dreamteam at its best, tuneful and thundersome and just weird enough.  Even the songs that are just Bradford or just Lockett sound like part of the whole.  Indivisible.  This is the album I judge all shoegaze records, all noise-pop records, every damn lo-fi record of the early 2010s against, and so few albums feel so warm and so vital.  It shimmers so, so clearly for such a foggy record.  Nothing comes close for me.

But what I love now, other than the sound (and no wallofsound will ever hit me as hard as “Calvary Scars II”, which hit me so hard with only three chords that it made me pick up the guitar) is how damn lonely it is.  

Stay: I don’t want you to stay.  I need you.

It’s not just that the record sounds like it was recorded by ghosts.  It feels like it was written by ghosts, too.

When friends go away for a while, they always come back. But now if friends go away for a while then they never come back

My favorite track—one of my favorite songs of all time, even ten years later—is “Vox Humana”.

And I remember holding the hand of the skeleton prince, and he swept me into his arms, and he—he had—tremolo—deep in the back of his black eye sockets, and he said, 

"Do you want to come away with me Into the pitch black pool?”

And I said, "I don't know,  I don't know, I don't know”

Photocopied, and the wind ripped through the trees.