Fluxblog
November 19th, 2019 3:17am

No Pride Or Joy


Deerhunter “Timebends”

A lot of the time, even with an artist I love and have followed for many years like Deerhunter, I put off listening to stand-alone or pre-album singles. It’s just a matter of prioritizing, and I don’t particularly like the drip drip drip drip approach to releasing songs in advance of a full record because then you hear the record in full and it feels more like a compilation. So it took a few weeks to get to “Timebends,” but I heard it at precisely the right time on a day when its lyrics about feeling emotionally flat would really click with my experience in the moment. It felt like that joke where someone in a video is aware that the song is narrating exactly what they’re doing and what’s going on around them.

“Timebends” isn’t the first time Bradford Cox has stretched out the length of a song, but it’s the first time he’s written something that’s so deliberately epic. It sounds like the goal here was to make a perfect finale for live shows and built in as many fun instrumental tangents as possible, right on down to a drum solo. It’s over-the-top but not in a way that undermines the drama of the song and the way Cox seems to be mourning the loss of a part of himself and questioning whether anything has actually been improved. It’s a little sad, but mostly just…blank. It’s very “it is what it is.”

Buy it from Amazon.

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