The votes are in and the jury has spoken: Deerhunter knows how to make fucking jangle pop!

Deerhunter

Halcyon Digest
4AD

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After the raw crystalline sludge of 2007’s Cryptograms, the band cleaned up its sound for 2008’s sublimely hooky but still sufficiently dreamy Microcastle. With Halcyon Digest, Deerhunter finally pulls out the big guns, delivering an album of buoyantly extroverted, instantly likable ear candy.

While lead singer and guitarist Bradford Cox has always demonstrated an almost Zen knack for crafting humbly infectious melodies, Digest marks his true debut as a charisma-spouting frontman. Stepping out from behind the studio murk of previous records, Cox’s crystal-clear voice refreshes like an ice-cold glass of orange juice, sparkling with the offhand cockiness of a genuine indie wunderkind.

Throughout, Cox doles out incredibly frisky inflections that hit you in the gut without tapping you on the shoulder: the way he drags out the word “out” on “Don’t Cry,” culminating in a wet, gushy “t,” or the way he turns “could you” into a sneezy “k-chew!” on “Revival.” Moments like these are constant reminders that this guy has been around the block and knows what the hell he’s doing.

The opening half of “Desire Lines” shows how Deerhunter’s newfound breeziness can occasionally translate to idleness, with Cox crooning vapidly optimistic lyrics like “Walking free, whoa-oh / Come with me, whoa-oh / Far away, whoa-oh.” But the track’s outro is further evidence that the band has song structure down to a T; Cox takes what should be a 10-bar guitar solo and stretches it over the course of three minutes, looping each chord progression into a hypnotic mantra before slyly giving way to the next reveal.

While Digest’s no-holds-barred pop style largely sacrifices the head-washy atmospherics of Deerhunter’s previous work, the album — at its best — is anything but sparse.

Lead single “Revival,” a two-minute exercise in heart-fluttery concision, could be the straight-up catchiest song the band has ever written — but the arrangement itself couldn’t be fuller. Underneath the rubber-gummy bass groove and nimble acoustic strumming at the track’s center lies a shifty ensemble of fuzzy synth blasts, syncopated shaker, snare-roll triplets and guiro scrapes that sound as if they were recorded underwater. The song is a perfect example of Digest’s deft melding of lo-fi and hi-fi, a commendable balancing act that makes for some incredibly tactile music.

The washed-out harmonica on “Memory Boy,” the frictiony sax blasts on “Coronado” and the stringy banjo licks on “Revival” are further testaments to the record’s textural vibrancy and eclectic instrumentation.

Digest’s bookends hint that Deerhunter hasn’t shaken the experimentation bug quite yet. Opener “Earthquake” is a memento of the band’s uncanny ability to craft surreally enveloping soundscapes out of just a few well plotted noises (in this case, an eerie assembly of reverb-drenched mouth sputters, crunchy lo-fi drum machine hits that sift intermittently into reverse and a spiraling guitar melody). And closer “He Would Have Laughed” morphs from narcotic afro-pop to homesick acoustic balladry over the course of seven minutes.

Unfortunately, Digest suffers from a momentum-killing three-song lull toward the end of the album. “Helicopter” pushes the envelope with a dazed medley of sickly sweet harpsichord chimes, druggy water splashes and shimmery clinking noises.