Deerhunter's Musical Masonry Shows a Few Foundational Cracks at the 40 Watt

Photo Credit: Christian West

by Rachel Bailey
10/22/2008

October 10th was a typical Friday at the 40 Watt: Chunklet magazine was celebrating its 15th anniversary, kicking off a weekend of shows with Atlanta big-shots Deerhunter.

Fellow Atlantans Gentleman Jesse and His Men churned out some 70's-inspired pub rock, and their contemporaries Carbonas surprised the audience with a few songs. Athens-based Twin Tigers, with their newly-added drummer Carr Chadwick, impressed with a tight set of their droning alt-pop. Comedian Brent Weinbach followed with banter that was sometimes funny, sometimes just plain disconcerting. The crowd indulged Chunklet founder, Henry Owing, for his rambling monologue potentially titled "Hey, ever hear about all those legendary Neutral Milk Hotel house parties from the Golden Day of Athens? Well, I was totally at them."

Finally, Deerhunter took the stage. Just as fans were getting fired up to see the headliners play, a visibly-irritated Bradford Cox spent five minutes noodling around with the wiring on his effects pedals. By the time the band started to play, it was clear that they were not at all happy.

They faked it well – for a while. Their set opened with the first three songs from their excellent new release, Microcastle. But early on, Cox complained about not getting a sound check, and indeed, there seemed to be some problems. Cox has said that on the new album, he was interested in exploring "microstructures," and the record is in fact full of delicate details. Sadly, the fine architecture of many of the songs was obscured by loud guitar fuzz, and Cox's enigmatic voice drowned in the sounds of the other instruments.

After this poor beginning, things only seemed to get worse. Cox was obviously having the hardest time dealing with the sound issues, and he couldn't help reminding the audience of them over and over again as he tried blaming them on everything under the sun: himself, the sound guy, bronchitis, even third guitarist Whitney Perry, who was added for the tour and seemed to be having trouble keeping up with the other members of the band.

Perry, apparently, was the straw the broke the camel's back for Cox, who stopped her during the opening of one of the best songs from Microcastle, "Saved By Old Times," to chastise her for not playing it correctly. The rest of the band watched as the singer threw a mini-tantrum about "not wanting to play songs that sound bad." From there, the show was impossible to salvage, and Deerhunter wrapped up with their last two songs, on which they often sounded out of sync.

Apparently gluttons for punishment, the audience cheered Deerhunter into a reluctant encore, for which they chose "Calvary Scars," extending the diaphanous lullaby into a five-minute meandering jam.

As any member of your local community theatre troupe can tell you, one of the most important things about live performance is at least pretending that everything is going well. Cox and crew would do well to keep this in mind in the future, because in the end it wasn't the bronchitis or even the sound, which really was quite poor, that did Deerhunter in last Friday; it was the band's inability to get through an hour of a less-than-stellar show without falling apart.