By 2010, indie music was looking like it was turning away from a series of regrettable choices; dead bands walking, basically. Then Halcyon Digest came along and reclaimed the joyous nostalgic highlights of the decade that had gone before in a captivating sonic capsule of subdued celebration.
This album still reaches out to me from the slumber of an era in tentative transition - a beacon from a pea soup fog. The youthfulness of old was suddenly paired with the magnetism of experimentation and the result was a scintillating salute that tore the banality surrounding it to shreds. It also contains some of frontman Bradford Cox’s best compositions: the molasses memory stick “Earthquake,” the deceptively jaunty “Revival,” the almost-Vampire Weekend old/timeyness of “Helicopter,” Cox’s tribute to the late Jay Reatard “He Would Have Laughed” and the band’s best song and bid for pop greatness, “Desire Lines.” Cox described the LP’s title as “a reference to a collection of fond memories and even invented ones, like my friendship with Ricky Wilson or the fact that I live in an abandoned victorian autoharp factory. The way that we write and rewrite and edit our memories to be a digest version of what we want to remember, and how that's kind of sad." The past is still with us, just in re-remembered and sometimes wholly invented form. A masterpiece that I wish more people immediately tagged as such. 10/10, no notes.
