Atlas Sound

Welcome to the two sides of Bradford Cox. In this corner stands a lonely man, nervous and overworked, shielded from the spotlight and disappointed by fame. In the opposite corner, Cox takes to the stage, puts on the musician’s mask and turns sorrowful water into tea. From the first line, Parallax has its cake and eats it, too: “Found money and fame but I found them really late,” Cox sings, slurring the last word to also imply the rhyme, “lame.” The play on words allows Cox to be at once disappointed with his forestalled celebrity and the celebrity itself. Throughout the album, art is portrayed through a dialectic, as something both mesmerizing and disruptive. During “Mona Lisa,” onlookers at the Louvre forget outlandish fantasies at the cost of forgetting their children. The value of art can only be measured through parallax—the apparent distance between two different points of view.

With his third solo album, Cox proves that Atlas Sound is more than an attempt to publish the castaways of Deerhunter, his main band. Cox’s solo efforts allow him freedoms unavailable in collaborative projects. The voiceless second half of “Flagstaff” evokes the warm undulations of the womb; the song’s first half experiments with nonsense lyrics and hallucinogenic tales of the “great white epileptic.” “Doldrums” plays with distortion to achieve an underwater blurriness equal to Cox’s rippling voice. Both songs are too quiet and remote to sound anything but out of place beside the arena rock guitars of a Deerhunter album.

Cox refuses to treat dark topics with seriousness. The album exhibits and pokes fun at painful experience. “Yeah, it is the story of the little boy who went to hell,” croons Cox without the slightest gloominess. “Terra Incognito” switches from talk of the Christian God to the effects of psychedelic drugs without hesitation, according each with equal importance. During “Praying Man,” Cox sounds flippant toward the plight of religious followers, warbling and swelling excessively given his somber lyrics. Throughout, Cox maintains the believability of two parallel vantage points, the wounded songwriter and the detached singer, showing an anesthetized loneliness that actually invites the listener in.