A quick scan of Deerhunter's body of work - which includes album and
song titles like "Fading Frontier" and "Memory Boy" - serves as a
reminder that the fleeting nature of life is something that has
fascinated Bradford Cox and company for years. Until the band's eighth
album, these meditations on ephemerality were deeply personal. On Why
Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?, Cox looks at the world around
him with the same intensity that he used to examine his own life on
earlier albums. Though this shift in perspective was brought on by the
political climate of the late 2010s, Deerhunter's version of resistance
isn't to rail against only the injustices of that era, but against a
seemingly endless history of inhumanity and death with songs that sound
deceptively life-affirming. The band's skill at pairing devastating
subject matter with chiming melodies has never been quite so subversive
as it is on the album's first two tracks. On "Death in Midsummer" --
which sounds as anthemic as a song about the piles of bodies left in the
wake of the Russian Revolution of 1917 can -- Cate Le Bon's brittle
harpsichord expresses the band's prickly nature and fondness for the
unexpected rather than the refinement it usually signifies in pop music.
"No One's Sleeping," a song inspired by the assassination of Labour
Party MP Helen Joanne Cox, cloaks lyrics like "There's much
duress/Violence has taken hold" in buoyant keyboards and brass. Later on
the album, Cox is unflinching yet compassionate as he reflects on the
inevitability of fading away on the ghostly standout "What Happens to
People?" Poignant moments like this could easily be mistaken for
nostalgia, but the sorrow that permeates Why Hasn't Everything Already
Disappeared? doesn't come from wishing things were the way they used to
be; it's because things turned out the way they did. Deerhunter makes it
abundantly clear that they're anti-nostalgia on the breezy "Futurism,"
and more indirectly on "Plains," a brief, brilliant sketch of friendship
and loss that takes inspiration from James Dean's time filming Giant in
Marfa, TX, where the band recorded much of the album. The band balances
these crystalline pop songs with tracks that explore the concept of
impermanence in more abstract, yet complementary, ways, whether via the
synth haze of "Greenpoint Gothic" or "Nocturne"'s transporting
instrumental coda, which lets the album drift to a close in perfectly
apt fashion. From the weariness and wonder in its title to the mix of
delicacy and anger in its songs, Why Hasn't Everything Already
Disappeared? is one of Deerhunter's most haunting and thought-provoking
albums.
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