SECONDS: ATLAS SOUND - "QUARANTINED"

Atlas Sound - "Quarantined"

I'm a big fan of Deerhunter (though I've largely been left cold by their past two major releases, Rainwater Cassette Exchange and Halcyon Digest) and of Bradford Cox's Atlas Sound project. Perhaps I should amend that clause to say “In theory, I'm a big fan. . .”. I really do love Deerhunter's Microcastle and their Fluorescent Grey EP (their finest release, in my mind). I like Cryptograms a great deal. Atlas Sound's second album, Logos, is pretty good. The conceptual ideas behind Bradford Cox's music, both in Deerhunter and as Atlas Sound, are even more intriguing to me than the music he's so far produced, though. I can't say that I particularly enjoy listening to Let The Blind Lead Those Who See But Cannot Feel, Atlas Sound's first album, nor can I say that I think Deerhunter is moving in an interesting direction aesthetically. “Quarantined” is, in my opinion, the best song Bradford Cox has ever written, and it points to everything I want both Deerhunter and Atlas Sound to be, at the same time that both projects seem to be abandoning (or at least massively downplaying) the style that brought me to them in the first place.

Like most of Bradford Cox's songs, there's not much in the way of lyrics to “Quarantined.” The same few lines are repeated over and over again with various changes to the phrasing. It's those changes, though, and the way that Cox uses them to tease out over the course of an entire song all the different emotional shadings in the relatively simple lines “Quarantined and kept so far away from my friends” and “I'm waiting to be changed” that I find so enthralling. The music surrounding him is both delicate (layers of bells, mbira, and pillowy synth pads) and propulsive (a driving bassline, upfront and muscular drums), and the balance between the two adds emotional weight, even as Cox's voice turns to weightless sighs and heads skyward. Where much of Atlas Sound and Deerhunter tends to fall into either the delicate or the propulsive end of the spectrum, Cox's pitch-perfect ability to balance the two on “Quarantined” is what started my interest in his music.

That nothing else he's done is quite able to match up to this song shouldn't be surprising (“Walkabout” on Logos feels to me like a self-conscious attempt to repeat the successes of “Quarantined,” but its forced air of whimsy buries it. Noah Lennox of Animal Collective guests on the song, and I have the same problem with the majority of his band's music). On an album that disappears inside of its own dreamy reflections far too often, Cox turns one of its most personal lyrics into a plea for connection and metamorphosis that nails the really painful and ambiguous feelings of growing up. A lot of Cox's music traffics in nostalgia—indeed, it's easy to understood the mutual admiration flowing between Cox and Animal Collective—and when it succeeds, I think it's not so much because it inspires nostalgia in the listener (how many people are really nostalgic for the pain and confusion of growing up?), but because it uses nostalgia as a window through which Cox can talk about connection, hope, and love.

The sound of “Quarantined” has always made me think of crystals, and I think it's an apt image: the song captures a moment of crystallization, a point at which the need for connection and the desire to seek that connection with others comes into being. In this way, “Quarantined” strikes me as the inverse of my first Seconds entry about Bark Psychosis' “The Black Meat.” Where that song always seems to dissolve, “Quarantined” wills itself into tangibility. It forces you to hope and believe in the possibility of connection because of the fierceness of its desire for connection. In a catalogue full of songs in which people fail to communicate or connect, “Quarantined” serves as a beacon of light and hope.