know when i can escape

Even if you listen to Atlas Sound without any prior knowledge of Bradford Cox’s main band Deerhunter or any of their records, Logos would still make for a certain kind of mysterious attraction. Most of the initial attention, including when you’re listening to the CD, would undoubtedly be placed on two collaborative efforts on Logos: the dream-pop incandescence of “Walkabout”, on which Cox apparently credits Animal Collective’s Panda Bear for teaching him how to make use of music samples; Stereolab’s Lætitia Sadier singing on “Quick Canal”, a propulsive 8½-minute song that glides effortlessly on the escapist joy of its unwavering beat and crests on a defiantly blissful ambience in the face of ebbing hope (“I found wisdom is learnt, through a costly process of success and failure”). The rest of Logos, featuring mostly Cox on his own, is as uniformly brilliant. The gauzy acoustic guitar tangos dashing for daylight on “The Light That Failed” (hey, Cox reading Rudyard Kipling or something?), the kiss-me-quick urgency of “Sheila”, and the overlapping melodic cacophonies of “Criminals” all mark the coloring of progress. Remarkable progress, that is.