Record Review: Atlas Sound - Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel

Rating: 9.0 / 10.0

God damn it. I can't get David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick out of my head. From the first time I listened to Bradford Cox aka Atlas Sound's Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel, I thought to myself, "Shit these songs would sound fucking amazing behind a really lurid film...about interstellar space travel...made in the 1980s (think Wild at Heart meets 2001: A Space Odyssey...can you see it...?)". I know that sounds like a pejorative to the nth degree, but it really, honestly isn't. In fact, it's actually one of the biggest compliments I could pay this record.

You see, making great music is often about achieving the elusive balance between things that run seemingly in opposition with one another: war and love, hope and loneliness, simplicity and relationships, David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick. Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel balances the real and the fake, hiding shimmering, emotion-laden pop songs beneath layers of distorted guitar, effects, and ambient noise. The vocals are often double-tracked, and - pulling a page out of George Martin's playbook - one track is bare, and the other is soaked in reverb and echo. While Martin used it to give depth to John Lennon's voice, on Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel, the contrast is exaggerated, endowing the vocals with an atmospheric, haunting, surreal character.

Cox has done the whole genre-blending thing here with great aplomb. Drawing heavily from shoegaze, electronic, pop, ambient, and folk, his songs are subtle, nuanced, and complex, but always accessible, always listenable. Naturally, experimental shoegaze rides shotgun, but this is by no means a Deerhunter record. This is, simply put, a far more peaceful, easy on the ears, effort than anything Deerhunter has done. Experimentation and aesthetics share the stage on this record in a way that rarely happens on Deerhunter albums. The stunning "Quarantined" exemplifies this balance, where hugely unorthodox instrumentation meets formidable melodic awareness. This level of attention to detail is never sacrificed, the record is the epitome of tact, subtlety, and a sort of relaxed precision from beginning to end.

What makes this beautiful balance more complex is that it's not just a musical one, it's a lyrical-emotional one too. Cox hides nuggets of emotion amid lyrics that are otherwise very abstract or sometimes too soaked in effects to be comprehensible. "I am waiting to be changed," Cox intones repeatedly on "Quarantined". It is a rare moment of bare vulnerability that reveals a tiny piece of what is beneath the synthesised surface of this record. Cox has hidden a reservoir of emotion beneath a carefully constructed shell of lyrical abstraction, and then he has allowed the shell to crack in a few places. There is a cautious pathos about this record that makes it more heartbreaking than all this bleeding-heart-on-sleeve emo crap we seem to be inundated with.

So in the rare event that David Lynch decides he wants to stop making shitty movies about farmers driving across the country on tractors, and Stanley Kubrick wants to come back from the dead to collaborate with him on one final masterpiece, Bradford Cox would be the ideal candidate to soundtrack that film. This record should tide us over until then.

-PTC