Myths 004

Album review

Cate Le Bon's role as producer on Deerhunter's 2019 album Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? can be heard in both the album's experimental tendencies and organic yet distant arrangements. Le Bon's own 2019 strike Reward had the same balance of strong songwriting and production that blurred curiosity and confusion. The creative friendship between Le Bon and Deerhunter's Bradford Cox takes new shapes on their collaborative EP Myths 004. At its most straightforward, the seven-song project sounds like what could be outtakes from either artist's 2019 album. Opening track "Canto!" features Cox in a dramatic double-tracked vocal melody in an arrangement decorated with strums of autoharp, dissonant guitar soloing, and heavy tandem drum kits. "Secretary" has Le Bon on lead vocals but follows a more otherworldly instrumental style, with bell-like melodic percussion, warped piano, and muted horns giving the song the same alien pallor of Reward. Cox comes in with a spoken word voice-over near the end of the tune, hemming together all of its abstract elements with a few calmly delivered words. From there, however, the EP quickly branches out in several random directions. Fragmentary instrumentals and longer songs both feel only partially cooked. The synthy instrumental "Constance" spins on for six minutes, highlighting different percussion sounds and airy electronic melodies. It's pretty but not nearly as captivating as the weakest songs from either party. Myths 004 was written and recorded over the course of a week when Cox and Le Bon were both in Marfa, Texas performing at a festival, and the rough-cut nature of the songs reflects the slap-dash nature of the album's creation. The duo go out on a ledge with their experimentation, and at its best, the EP has echoes of some of the contained madness of Faust or Sonic Youth's early ragged searching. Assembled quickly, the entire affair is loose and meandering. At times, Le Bon and Cox hit on something entertaining or interesting, but it's far from essential work from two of the best songwriters of their era.

© Fred Thomas /TiVo