I’ve followed Deerhunter for a few years, catching them two years ago at Loufest, but I’m really jazzed for their new release, Monomania, which hits May 7th, after their performance last week. On Tuesday they were the musical guest on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon where they played the title track, and just tore things up. A lot of response I’ve read online has questioned, or poked fun at, Bradford Cox’s outfit and his walking off set near the end of the song, but who cares, it’s rock and roll, it’s great. As for the song, it far outdoes any thoughts I had of their future material, this is something else:
UPDATE the video has disappeared - here’s a similar performance of the song, but I much prefer the Fallon version.
The site CollegeDJ summed things up, “Bradford Cox transformed himself into “Connie Lungpin” for the performance, donning a wig and bandaged fingers. “Monomania” is the title track from the band’s upcoming album, out May 7th” Then at COS they describe the album as a, ”…the 12-track effort was recorded at Rare Book Room Studio in Brooklyn. Cox hinted to Rolling Stone that it’s “a very avant-garde rock & roll record,” citing influences from The Ramones to Steve Reich and Pierre Schaeffer to Bo Diddley." Well, from the Fallon appearance we can already see some of the Ramones in them, since in his getup Bradford made for a convincing Joey stand in. Here’s the track again, this time the studio version, that they released the same day.
It’s hard to judge an album from just the first single, but going by this, and their past efforts, I’m enthusiastic about it; we may be talking about the album of the Summer here! (last year’s was Spiritualized recent effort in case I didn’t mention it before) Elsewhere we see the track listing for Monomania:
- Neon Junkyard
- Leather Jacket II
- The Missing
- Pensacola
- Dream Captain
- Blue Agent
- T.H.M.
- Sleepwalking
- Back To The Middle
- Monomania
- Nitebike
- Punk (La Vie Antérieure)