Helicopter (Deerhunter)

Last night I had the undeniable pleasure of seeing Deerhunter here in New Orleans. I saw them open up for Spoon back in March, but this time around things were different. Drastically damn good different. First difference, their new album. "Halcyon Digest", released in September 2010, is in my opinion the best Deerhunter album to date. It's yet another emotionally rich, sensitive, and atmospheric work from Bradford Cox (singer, guitarist and brain of Deerhunter). And as predictable as that may sound, after one listen to this album you realize that it's predictable and surprising in all the right places. "Halcyon Digest" might be an easy listen compared to past Deerhunter albums, but it takes more effort to digest. Cox has said "music always takes special forms when it's intertwined with nostalgia." This album reminisces his youth, and the past of others. Though the album in its entirety is superb, there are two songs that stick out for me: "Coronado" and "Helicopter".



"Coronado"
This song has saxophone. I repeat, this song has saxophone. Need I say anymore?



"Helicopter"
This is possibly the saddest song ever written. On the album, Bradford Cox explains the true story behind it.

"Dima (real name Dimitry Marakov) was born in 1986 in the town of Nalchik, Russia. From a young age, he dreamed of working in the fashion industry as a designer. Lacking the moral or financial support of his parents, he actively sought out contacts within the industry through the internet. At the age of 14, he became acquainted with a successful fashion photographer in St. Petersburg who invited the boy to come live with him and work as his assistant. Dima accepted the offer and moved in with the photographer. According to friends of Dima, he became the older man’s lover for approximately the next year. He eventually grew dissatisfied with the lack of benefits he had been promised would result from the arrangement. He left the photographer to become live-in lovers with a wealthy man who provided the financial backing for a conglomerate of pornographic gay websites. It was at this point that Dimitry adopted the stage name Dima and, with the help of false documents that corrected his age to the legal 18, began a successful career modeling naked and starring in hardcore sex videos on the gay websites financed by his lover.
Between the age of 15 and 18, Dima was a highly sought after pornographic model and performer. He saved the money he made from modeling to pay for the tuition at a leading college of fashion that he hoped to attend when he reached 18. At a certain point, Dima began supplementing his income by renting himself out as an escort within his lover’s circle of associates and acquaintances. According to friends of Dima, they included several leading figures in the entertainment industry as well as one of the most powerful men in Russia’s world of organized crime. Dima began to express concern to his friends that the organized crime figure had become obsessed with him, but he refused to accept their advice to stop seeing the man because of the large amount of money these dates were earning him. Sometime in 2005, Dima abruptly left his lover, gave up his modeling career, cut off all communication with his friends, and moved in with the organized crime figure. The last public Dima sighting was late that year when his friend Ignat Lebedev, who was also working as a male escort at the time, accompanied a client to a private sex club where he claims to have witnessed a very thin and confused looking Dima being forcibly sodomized by a group of perhaps ten to fifteen men. Lebedev claims his client identified one of the men as the organized crime figure and dissuaded him from speaking to Dima for his own protection.
Lebedev claims he described what he’d seen to Dima’s former lover and was told Dima had been killed the previous week and that he shouldn’t speak of this again. Lebedev reported both incidents to the police, but after interviewing the lover and being told Lebedev had made the story up, they declined to investigate the matter. In 2006, Lebedev persuaded a prominent Russian gay journalist to write an article on Dima’s disappearance, but during the course of investigating the story, the writer was abducted by unknown assailants, beaten, and told he would be murdered if he wrote the story. Dima has not been seen or reliably heard from in three years, although in early 2007 another organized crime figure, Evgeny Ershova, who was awaiting trial on an unrelated murder charge, claimed that in late 2005 he witnessed a young male prostitute matching Dima’s description be pushed out of a helicopter over a remote forest in the north of Russia. Before Dima’s ex-lover died of lung cancer in late 2007, he reportedly confessed to friends that Dima was sold as a sex slave to a man in the Ukraine in late 2005 and had lived until late 2006 when he’d committed suicide."

With that being said, please take a listen.



I have to thank Daytrotter for my discovery of Deerhunter. With that being said, here's the session that started it all for me: DEERHUNTER DAYTROTTER SESSSION!

Buffalo Girls (TV On The Radio)

Discovered a delicious treat, but this may be the most hipster blog post I ever write. However, it has good intentions. Yesterday, prior to our radio show, my co-dj Kota and I were expressing our love for TV On The Radio. It was in this conversation that Kota broke the news: TV On The Radio's debut self-released album called "OK Calculator". Yes, it is exactly what you think. Yes, it alludes to Radiohead's "OK Computer". Yes it was created in 2002, a whole year prior to their very first major release of "Young Liars EP". Yes, it may be primarily a capella. Yes, it is rare if not impossible to own on hard copy. Yes, thanks to modern day technology and mediafire you and I can now own it. Yes. Yes. and Yes. Not to be hipster, but you kind of have to already know TVOR to appreciate this. Of course, it’s not even remotely polished up, but can you really expect to have it any other way? "OK Calculator" scales pretty much every style they could later go onto incorporate. At times it isn’t shocking that this would be the same band that would create "Dear Science", and at other times it sounds so devoid of any real musical theme that it becomes hard to think of as the band's ‘roots'. Even if that’s not a bad thing, it’s disheartening to think they’ll never pull out these ideas again. Granted, at the same time, it’s a blessing. My friend Sarah suggested the following after Kota told her about this album, "Can we name our future band's first album 'OK Smartphone'?"




"We made this disc OK Calculator and left it in cafes and just different places. Just 24 tracks of four-track stuff. And that's on-line now. We sold a few of them on our first tour, a couple, but then the CD burner broke, etc. That's on-line and someone wrote about it as "the extremely rare but superb OK Calculator" and I’m sitting there going, "Are you kidding me?" Rare, yeah, rare because we're making them ourselves, and superb, that's not up to us, but it's not superb. (laughs) I’d be the first person to tell you. There's more hiss on some of those songs than there are songs. And it's fun, and I love it, but I wouldn't call it superb."
-- Tunde Adebimpe, in a 2004 Downhill Battle interview

Download and Enjoy :)